Engineering the Performance of a Meta-modeling Architecture

Abstract

The Reflection architectural pattern is an elegant reusable solution to design software applications based on a metamodel that provides a self-representation of the types used in the domain model. This provides significant benefits in terms of adaptability, maintainability, self-awareness, and direct involvement of domain experts in the configuration stage. However, while virtuous in the perspective of objectoriented development, the meta-model adds a level of indirection that may result in poor performance. The complexity is further exacerbated when the object-oriented domain model is mapped to a relational database. We identify four performance anti-patterns that may naturally occur in the design of a meta-modeling architecture, and for each of them we propose a refactoring intervention on the object model and on the database mapping strategy. Experimental results are reported to characterize the gain obtained applying the proposed refactoring techniques to a real case of data management system, in order to provide a roadmap for engineering the performance of meta-modeling architectures.

A Model to Enable the Reuse of Metadata-Based Frameworks in Adaptive Object Model Architectures

“…The relevance about studies about AOM can be confirmed by some recent works found in the literature that used directly or were based on this architectural style, such as for economy mechanics in digital games [3], model-driven architectures [4], [5], data evolution in digital ecosystems [6], meta-modeling architectures [7], and creating dynamic web services [8], [9]. But besides this architectural style is still applied, to the best of our knowledge, except for our previous work with Esfinge AOM Role Mapper [38]- [40], there are no other works in the last five years that focused on advances for the design of AOM architectures.…”

“…Several more recent studies employed AOM concepts for several applications and domains, such as for economy mechanics in digital games [3], model-driven architectures [4], [5], data evolution in digital ecosystems [6], meta-modeling architectures [7], and dynamic web services [8], [9]. That can be considered an evidence that this architectural style is still relevant and applied in recent works.…”