Slavica Aleksic

An approach to the specification of user interface templates for business applications

Through a number of research projects we propose a form-driven approach to business application generation. Our IIS*Studio development environment (IIS*Studio DE, current version 7.1) is aimed to support the form-driven approach and provides the information system (IS) design and generating executable business application prototypes. An executable business application specification, generated by means of IIS*Studio, may be visually interpreted in different ways. In the paper we present the extension of the IIS*Studio repository containing the common model of user interface (UI). The IIS*UIModeler is an integrated part of the IIS*Studio development environment, aimed at modelling UI templates. Applying it, a designer specifies UI templates. UI template specification contains attribute values that describe common UI characteristics, such as: screen size, main application window position, background/foreground colour, etc. UI template specifications are independent from any specific IS project specification, generated by means of IIS*Studio tool. The same UI template may be used for the business application prototype generation of different ISs. Also, the same IS project specification may be visually interpreted in different ways by means of different UI templates. The specification of a UI template may be seen as a fully platform independent UI model. Besides the detail description of UI template common model, we illustrate the main features of the IIS* UIModeler tool.

Extended Entity-Relationship approach in a Multi-Paradigm Information System Modeling Tool

In this paper we present a Multi-Paradigm Information System Modeling Tool (MIST) that supports Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) approach to database design. MIST components currently provide a formal specification of EER database schema specification and its transformation into the relational data model, or the class model. Also, MIST allows generation of Structured Query Language (SQL) code for database creation and procedural code for implementing database constraints. In addition, Java code that stores and processes data from the database, may be generated from the class model.

Database reverse engineering based on meta-models

Reengineering is one of the key concepts in software maintenance and evolution. It generally includes some form of reverse engineering followed by some form of forward engineering or restructuring. In the paper we focus on database reverse engineering. Model-driven software engineering promotes the idea of abstracting implementation details by focusing on: models as first class entities and automated generation of models or code from other models. In the approach meta-models are used to define the modeling languages. A database reverse engineering process can benefit of integrating meta-modeling and meta-models in the process. The plethora of models related to databases points out to the need and importance of model-to-model transformations between these models at different abstraction levels. These transformations are based on meta-models that are conformed by the source and target models of the transformations. A database reverse engineering process can be performed through a chain of model-to-model transformations based on a set of meta-models. In the paper we discuss the importance of meta-modeling in the context of database reverse engineering and present a case study illustrating an approach to database reverse engineering.

Faceoff: surrogate vs. natural keys

The natural and surrogate key architectures are two competing approaches to specifying keys in relational databases. We analyze the performance of these approaches with respect to the update complexity and the query data and expression complexity. Our results provide new insights into the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.