Integrating the common variability language with multilanguage annotations for web engineering

Abstract

Web applications development involves managing a high diversity of files and resources like code, pages or style sheets, implemented in different languages. To deal with the automatic generation of custom-made configurations of web applications, industry usually adopts annotation-based approaches even though the majority of studies encourage the use of composition-based approaches to implement Software Product Lines. Recent work tries to combine both approaches to get the complementary benefits. However, technological companies are reticent to adopt new development paradigms such as feature-oriented programming or aspect-oriented programming. Moreover, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, to apply these programming models to web applications, mainly because of their multilingual nature, since their development involves multiple types of source code (Java, Groovy, JavaScript), templates (HTML, Markdown, XML), style sheet files (CSS and its variants, such as SCSS), and other files (JSON, YML, shell scripts). We propose to use the Common Variability Language as a composition-based approach and integrate annotations to manage fine grained variability of a Software Product Line for web applications. In this paper, we (i) show that existing composition and annotation-based approaches, including some well-known combinations, are not appropriate to model and implement the variability of web applications; and (ii) present a combined approach that effectively integrates annotations into a composition-based approach for web applications. We implement our approach and show its applicability with an industrial real-world system.

Towards Erlang-based ABS Microservices Framework for Software Product Line Development

“…However, they only described general ideas for a combined approach and discuss the resulting characteristics (granularity, traceability, etc.). Then Horcas et al [19] proposed to integrate annotations into a composition-based approach. Horcas et al integrate a Common Variability Language (CVL) with annotations to manage variability in SPLE for web application [19].…”

Software Product Line Engineering

“…Furthermore, the recurrent nature of the FQAs makes them suitable to be used in many different domains. Domains like web engineering involve multiple types of programming languages (e.g., JavaScript, Python, Groovy), and markup languages (e.g., HTML, CSS, XML) where applying typical variability development paradigms of SPL such as FOP or AOP is extremely difficult or even impossible [30]. DI.Req1.…”

“…Concerning DI.Req2., FeatureIDE and pure::variants offer very good support for implementing the variability at the code level as discussed in DI.Req1, while vEXgine needs specific extensions to work at code level [30]. At a high abstraction level (architecture and design), both pure::variants and vEXgine offer the best support.…”

“…When considered, these activities are usually integrated into the traditional SPL process by reusing existing mechanisms, which were not specifically designed for that purpose (e.g., using attributes of extended variability models to model NFPs [10]). The most common is to find companies that only adopt a minor part of an SPL methodology (e.g., implementing variability with annotations) [30], which is sometime abandoned after a short period of time because of the lack of integration among the SPL activities. Only a few companies with enough financial resources have succeeded on using SPLs, due in most cases to the development of their own tools or the use of commercial tools (e.g., pure::variants [12], Gears [40]) that are not so accessible for smaller companies.…”

“…. ) in the same application [30]. In addition, there are few works specifically focused on studying the SPL tool support [6,43,51] and, they usually report information that is extracted from the tool documentation or reference papers without really testing the tool availability and usability.…”