Software Engineering Research Group Kassel

Formalizing textual scenario descriptions by deriving object diagrams from them requires the world knowledge of a software developer. The modeling decisions he makes in the process remain in his head unless he discusses them with others. Although this is an important step in the software development process there is near to no tool support for this. With NT2OD Online we will guide him through the process, suggest modeling decisions and keep track of his decisions to reuse them later. Ultimately, we plan to learn crowd sourced modeling decisions and apply them to new textual scenarios. In this idea paper we present the current state of NT2OD and the plans we have for it.

Originally, model versioning has been developed to enable teams of developers to work on common model data, concurrently. We have the idea to use the same techniques to facilitate the collaboration of collaboration applications. Multi threaded applications share a common main memory. Thus, all threads have access to the full data structures and each thread may query and update the data structures, concurrently, in order to fulfill its tasks. In distributed applications, each distributed process has access only to its own share of the data model. In order to query and update remote data structure parts, the process has to send an appropriate request to the process, that owns that data. Transferring complex data structures, e.g. as query result, from one process to the other requires tedious data serialization and deserialization mechanisms. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes to replicate model data for each process and to use model versioning techniques to synchronize the different model data replicas. We have built a web based workflow editor and a web based version of a Ludo game to validate this idea. This paper reports about our experiences with the data replication approach and our experiences in using it for web applications.

This paper documents the initial results of an attempt to create tool support for the “objects first” development process. The idea is to apply natural language processing (NLP) and ontology learning techniques to textual use case descriptions and derive an initial object diagram that can be refined by the software developer. The prototype is a proof of concept for simple sentences and will be further improved.

The latest research activities of the Fujaba group of Kassel University led to challenges in development of new web tech- nologies enabling end users to wrap services into web gad- gets and to combine them into complex web applications. Web applications running inside a webbrowser bring new requirements to the traditional desktop application devel- opment process. Since web applications usually don’t come to life using model based approaches or Story Driven Mod- elling the Fujaba Toolsuite has to be adopted to fulfil the new requirements. The Fujaba group of Kassel wanted to get all the help we are used to get from Fujaba in ordinary application develop- ment for our web applications, too. Thus, we are developing a new code generation for the generation of Google Web Toolkit compliant Java code that will then be compiled into JavaScript running on web browsers. In addition, we develop tool support for building the GUIs of such web applications. And, on the server side, we develop technologies to facilitate service development with Fujaba. This paper reports on the design of these new Fujaba web components.

Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Analyse von Objektstrukturen bei der modellgetriebenen Softwareentwicklung. Um bei der Fehlersuche eine geignete Quellcodezeile zu identifizieren, ab der die Überwachung der Programmausführung Hinweise auf die Fehlerursache liefert, fehlt ein Werkzeug, mit dem die Änderungen an der Objektstruktur einer Software auf Modellebene und im zeitlichen Verlauf analysiert werden können. Zur Bewältigung dieser Herausforderung werden die Änderungen an der Objektstruktur zur Laufzeit einer Anwendung aufgezeichnet und später als Objektdiagramm visualisiert und navigierbar gemacht. Die Realisierung dieses Konzepts erfolgt durch die Integration von eDOBS und CoObRA zum neuen Flipbook Werkzeug.