Michael Schwind

SLIM--A Lightweight Environment for Synchronous Collaborative Modeling

UML diagrams have become the de-facto standard for the visual modeling of software systems. The creation and discussion of these diagrams is a critical factor impacting the quality of the artifacts under development. Traditionally, facilitating the collaboration of globally distributed team members with heterogeneous system environments has been a costly and time-consuming endeavor. This paper aims to advance the state-of-the-art of model-based development by providing a collaboration environment, which supports the synchronous distributed creation and manipulation of UML diagrams and also lowers the technical entry barriers for participating in the modeling process. We present a prototypical implementation of a collaborative editor for synchronous lightweight modeling (SLIM). Applying innovative techniques, which only rely on functionality natively supported by modern web browsers, technical issues impeding clients to be integrated into the collaborative environment are avoided and ad hoc collaboration is facilitated.

Synchronite - A Service for Real-Time Lightweight Collaboration

Ad hoc collaboration across organizational boundaries is gaining importance. In a networked world, organizations interact across diverse system landscapes with partners and customers. Traditionally, facilitating the collaboration of dispersed participants in heterogeneous environments required the same software on all client systems. This entry barrier can be lowered by leveraging the ubiquitous web browser as a platform. Loosely coupled teams benefit from asynchronous tools, e.g. wikis, but often support for more immediate interaction is required to effectively apply collective skills and develop a common understanding of shared artifacts. In this paper, we present a lightweight, application-agnostic collaboration service that provides a real-time collaboration layer on top of existing single user web applications supporting synchronous work at a distance. Applying innovative techniques, which only rely on functionality natively supported by modern web browsers, technical issues impeding clients to be integrated into the collaboration environment are avoided and ad hoc collaboration is facilitated.

Leveraging Semantic Web technologies for business component specification

Although component-based development (CBD) is among the predominant software engineering paradigms today, numerous issues still remain preventing business component marketplaces from taking off. For example, it is state of the practice to apply different notations and modeling languages for the specification of different aspects of a business component. Besides the fact that there is a lack of standards for holistic approaches to multi-faceted business component specification, the individual specification techniques very often are not powerful enough to allow for the reliable and efficient discovery and retrieval of matching components or the automatic deduction of statements about the semantic and syntactic compatibility of components for application composition. In this article, we argue that CBD processes can greatly benefit from the use of Semantic Web technologies for business component specification. The Resource Description Framework (RDF), for example, can provide a means to integrate existing specification approaches and add new value by superimposing a common knowledge representation layer on all specification artifacts, thus enabling semantic queries and reasoning about the properties of business components.

Generating Families of Business Components from Metamodel Hierarchies

Model-driven software development (MDSD) has gained acceptance in the software development industry over the last few years. Current approaches to MDSD favor targeting particular domains over general-purpose modeling and code generation solutions. The OMEGA toolset provides an infrastructure for the rapid development of domain-specific modeling and code generation facilities. It is based on the concept of metamodel hierarchies. In this paper we propose an extension to the OMEGA approach that is targeted at enabling the evolutionary development of families of business components by introducing additional model types. The paper provides an overview of the OMEGA approach and describes the integration of family and feature models as configuration data to the OMEGA code generator and the expected benefits. A short outlook at the end of the paper outlines future work on this matter

Experiences with hierarchy-based code generation in the J2EE context

OMEGA is a model-driven code generation approach based on Executable UML enhanced with extension information provided by metamodel hierarchies. It is domain-specific but can easily incorporate new or related domains. In this experience report, we describe the challenges encountered during the implementation of a code-generation facility for the J2EE platform.