OSTRICH: a rich template language for low-code development (extended version)

Lourenço, Hugo; Ferreira, Carla; Seco, João Costa; Parreira, Joana

doi:10.1007/s10270-022-01066-1

Cited by 3 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Our developments are complementary to prior work [23,24] in the sense that they improve the experience of template developers, by improving the quality of the template library and supporting the evolution of templates, and the experience of template users by letting them edit the results without fear of losing their customizations. The previous instantiation mechanism, integrated IDE, was external to the language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Prior work [24] presents a parameterisable version of the model that instantiates this application given an entity as an argument to a declared parameter. We then extended it with the type system [23] that statically checks the dependencies between parameters referred to above. In this paper, we further increase the expressiveness of OSTRICH by allowing the instantiation of templates inside the definition of other templates, thus supporting the reuse and sharing of code between template definitions.…”

Section: Nested Templatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Low-code frameworks strive to simplify and speed up application development and abstraction is essential to achieve these goals. The native support for the safe reuse and usage of parameterized coarse-grain components in OSTRICH-a rich template language for the OutSystems platform [23,24]. OSTRICH was designed to simplify the use and creation of such components and provide developers with strong guardrails and a rich software-building experience.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We further improve the experience for both template and application developers by complementing template evolution with a redo capability for code customization operations. To support composition, we equip the template language OSTRICH [23,24] with a built-in abstraction mechanism and, to support evolution, we use a code customization logging mechanism and a redo capability. Without nested templates, OSTRICH only allowed for the top-level reuse of template application components, integrated into the IDE functionality, and any reapplication of a template would override previous instances.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…OSTRICH templates follow an approach similar to other model-driven low-code programming approaches, like templates in UML (MOF) [28,40,41] and MetaDepth [11], where templates are instantiated in place by an external mechanism. In OSTRICH, even though the instantiation algorithm in [23,24] is embedded into the behavior of the development environment; nevertheless, it is not a part of the semantics of the language. The main difference with modeldriven approaches is that OSTRICH produces code at the same level of abstraction as the template definitions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Going beyond templates: composition and evolution in nested OSTRICH

Costa Seco,

Lourenço,

Parreira

et al. 2024

Softw Syst Model

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Low-code frameworks strive to simplify and speed up application development. An essential mechanism to achieve these goals is to have native support for the safe reuse and usage of parameterized coarse-grain components, providing developers with strong guardrails and a rich software-building experience. —a rich template language for the OutSystems platform—was designed to simplify the use and creation of such components. Thus, the application developer can quickly reuse and assemble sophisticated and thoroughly tested application blocks. However, without a built-in composition and evolution mechanism, templates are still hard to create and maintain. This sometimes requires the repetition of code across different templates and creates a conflict between the customizations of the instantiated application models, and the update and reapplication of a template definition. This paper presents a principled mechanism for using abstraction in the creation of templates and simultaneously supporting the evolution of templates in applications after use. First, we introduce a template composition mechanism, its typing discipline, and its instantiation algorithm for model-driven low-code development environments. We start by extending to support nested templates and allow the instantiation (hatching) of templates in the definition of other templates. Nesting promotes a significant increase in code reuse potential, leading to a safer evolution of applications. We then introduce the support for customizable template instances, which allows one to evolve templates’ code and then update a template instance without losing customizations performed in the generated code. The present definition seamlessly extends the existing OutSystems metamodel with template constructs expressed by model annotations that maintain backward compatibility with the existing language toolchain. We present the metamodel, a set of annotations to support the extensions, and the corresponding validation and instantiation algorithms. In particular, we introduce a type-based validation procedure for abstractions that ensures that using templates always produces valid models. This work also extends prior developments on Nested OSTRICH with the support for safe customizations of instantiated code. We validate Nested OSTRICH using the benchmark by identifying the degree of reusability that can be reached in the existing sample of real templates and template uses. Our prototype is an extension of the OutSystems IDE that allows the annotation of models and their use to produce new models. We also analyze which existing OutSystems sample screen templates can be improved by using and sharing nested templates .

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Nested Templatesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%