Associations in MDE: A Concern-Oriented, Reusable Solution

Abstract

DEDICATION To my family and friends,for all the support they have given me. Thank you.ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my thesis advisor, Prof. Jörg Kienzle for all his time and energy.I enjoyed the long meetings and discussions.Thank you to Matthias Schöttle for all the effort and time he invested in me while working in the lab and for reading my thesis.I am also grateful to Vincent Foley for agreeing to also read my thesis and giving me feedback even without knowing anything about MDE.Finally, I thank Nishanth and Berk as well as Matthias again for a great lab spirit and to all those lunches and laughs together.iii ABSTRACT Associations are a very common concept in software modelling, in particular when using class diagrams for expressing domain models or structural design models. Concern-Oriented Reuse (CORE) proposes a new way of structuring model-driven software development where models of the system are modularized by domains of abstraction within units of reuse called concerns. This thesis illustrates how many of the variations of associations and association implementations have been captured within a concern called Association, together with behavioural models that ensure uniqueness, minimum/maximum size constraints and referential integrity. Furthermore, the provided Association concern documents the impact of using a specific association variation on high-level system qualities. Finally, the thesis describes how the TouchCORE tool was streamlined to support concern-oriented, agile, UMLconformant modelling with associations and rapid selection of association variants according to desired high-level system qualities. iv ABRÉGÉ Les associations sont un concept très commun en modélisation de logiciel, particulièrement en utilisant des diagrammes de classe pour représenter des modèles de domaine ou des modèles de conception. La réutilisation orientée préoccupation (CORE) propose une nouvelle manière de structurer le développement de logiciel dirigé par des modèles où les modèles du système sont modulables à l'intérieur d'une unité réutilisable appelée une préoccupation. Cette thèse illustre les variations des associations et la mise en oeuvre des associations capturées dans une préoccupation appelée Association, ainsi que les modèles de comportement qui garantissent

Monitoring Association Constraints in Model-Oriented Programming

“…E.g., in [26] the authors discuss a numbers of inter association constraints on ontology relations and how they can be implemented with RDF. More similar to us, in [27], the authors present a framework that uses Concern-Oriented Reuse (CORE) to deal with associations and their constraints (uniqueness, multiplicity and referential integrity). CORE [28] uses aspect orientation to weave different concerns at the modeling level.…”

Collection Skeletons: Declarative Abstractions for Data Collections

“…In [2], a framework that uses Concern-Oriented Reuse (CORE) to capture many different kinds of associations, their properties, behaviour and various implementation solutions within a reusable artifact has been proposed. Their work has focused on software reuse, which also inspired our work regarding portability.…”