Alejandro Cortiñas

A Reusable Software Architecture for Geographic Information Systems Based on Software Product Line Engineering

In the last years there has been a continuous growth in functionality of geographic information systems GIS resulting in many different software artifacts. Even though each GIS is used in different areas with different objectives, they all share many features and requirements and therefore it is possible to apply techniques based on intensive software reuse, such as software product line engineering SPLE. Although there has been much research on software product line engineering in the last years, the definition of a software product line for the domain of geographic information systems has not been undertaken. In this work we identify the requirements and functionalities of a generic product for a web-based geographic information system, grouping them into commonalities that allow us to reuse many software artifacts, and variabilities that allow use to configure different products. Then, we define the functional and technological architecture of a software product line that uses current technologies for web-based application development. Finally, we design a tool to configure and assemble the components to generate the possible products. The resulting platform is flexible enough to adapt each product to the specific needs of each customer.

Scaffolding and in-browser generation of web-based GIS applications in a SPL tool

The SME (Small and medium-sized enterprise) Enxenio has developed many web-based Geographic Information Systems within the last decade. Since the demand for GIS is increasing, Enxenio decided to apply Software Product Line Engineering to this domain to facilitate the development of complete web-based GIS applications, increasing their quality, improving the time-to-market and, at the same time, reducing their cost to its clients. This demo shows the resulting tool of this process, which is able to generate the source code of a web-based GIS from the set of desired features and the definition of its data model. This tool can be run within a web browser and the derivation engine in charge of generating the code is based on the scaffolding technique.

Storing and Clustering Large Spatial Datasets Using Big Data Technologies

In this paper we present the architecture of a system to store, query and visualize on the web large datasets of geographic information. The architecture includes a component to simulate a large number of drivers that report their position on a regular basis, an ingestion component that is generic and can acommodate three different storage technologies, a query component that aggregates the results in order to reduce the query time and the data transfered, and a web-based map viewer. In addition, we define an evaluation methodology to be used to benchmark and compare different alternatives for some components of the system, and we validate the architecture with experiments using a dataset of 40 million locations of drivers.

Improving GISBuilder with Runtime Product Preview

Software product lines allow users with little development experience to configure and generate applications. On the web this approach is becoming more and more popular due to the low time required to bring a new release to the final users. The architecture of web applications though require complex development environments in order to allow users to test and evaluate a new configuration. In this work we present a novel approach, based on in-browser generation and emulation techniques, which can be applied to real-world state of the art software product lines, reducing test deployment complexity and enabling an agile development cycle.

Generation of Web-Based GIS Applications Through the Reuse of Software Artefacts

This demo shows the automatic generation of different web-based geographic information systems using a tool based on software product lines engineering. These systems are variant regarding the data domain they can manage and the functionalities they provide. Although the products are different, the set of assets that implement the GIS-related functionalities is the same. These assets are assembled together by our tool depending on the particular requirements of each products. In the demo, we show the behaviour of both the tool generating the products and the products themselves.

A Case Study on Visualizing Large Spatial Datasets in a Web-Based Map Viewer

Lately, many companies are using Mobile Workforce Management technologies combined with information collected by sensors from mobile devices in order to improve their business processes. Even for small companies, the information that needs to be handled grows at a high rate, and most of the data collected have a geographic dimension. Being able to visualize this data in real-time within a map viewer is a very important deal for these companies. In this paper we focus on this topic, presenting a case study on visualizing large spatial datasets. Particularly, since most of the Mobile Workforce Management software is web-based, we propose a solution suitable for this environment.

Integrating the common variability language with multilanguage annotations for web engineering

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.

Creating Web-Based GIS Applications Using Automatic Code Generation Techniques

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have increased its popularity for some time now, specially in the context of mobile devices. There are many disciplines and companies improving their workflow by using GIS on devices with geolocation features. To satisfy the emergent demand, lots of web-based GIS applications are being developed. These applications diverge in their target and context, but they all share a common set of the features. For some time an effort has been carried out to define standards in GIS, and currently the level of interoperability between GIS software assets is the highest ever. Given that there is a need to create web-based GIS applications sharing a set of features and that, thanks to the standards, GIS technologies are interoperable, it is not only possible but desirable to apply strategies of reuse, mass-customization and software generation to develop web-based GIS applications.

Enabling Agile Web Development Through In-Browser Code Generation and Evaluation

Rapid evolution and flexibility are the key of modern web application development. Rapid Prototyping approaches try to facilitate evolution by reducing the time between the elicitation of a new requirement and the evaluation of a prototype by both developers and customers. Software generation, with disciplines such as Software Product Lines Engineering or Model Driven Engineering, favours the required flexibility for the development process. Nevertheless, each small change in the design of an application requires a full redeployment of complex environments in order to allow customers to test and evaluate the new configuration. In this work we present an approach that improves the development process reducing the complexity of deploying evaluation prototypes and enabling an agile development cycle. The approach can be applied using software generation and it is based on in-browser generation and evaluation. We also describe two real world tools that have integrated the proposed approach in their development cycle.