Abstract
The Design Science research method was hereby employed to develop an artifact that demonstrates the experimental “model-aware” software engineering methodology in the context of PHP Web development – a “low code” development approach with code templates generated from technology-specific models. The proof-of-concept consists of two interacting components: a custom diagrammatic modeling environment and model-driven generated PHP pages. The interaction between the two components conforms the engineering method labelled as “Model-aware software engineering” (MASE) – a flavor of model-driven engineering recently introduced in research projects as a hybridization of the Agile Modeling Method Engineering (AMME) framework and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The experimental MASE method is employed here to demonstrate its feasibility for the common Model-View-Controller (MVC) website development pattern, thus showing potential to support common Web development work.
Highlights
Recent research in model-driven engineering introduced two novel notions: (a) “technologyspecific” modeling languages, a kind of domain-specific modeling languages where, instead of domain concepts, the language must assimilate technology-specific constructs as first order modeling citizens [1] and (b) “model-aware software engineering” (MASE), a flavor of modeldriven engineering where models interact with running software through semantic technology [2]
Design Science [3] was engaged as a research method and MASE [2] as an engineering method, combining Agile Modeling Method Engineering (AMME) [4] with Resource Description Framework (RDF) [5] as semantic bridge between the PHP development environment and the technologyspecific models
Conceptual modeling is the key to designing information systems, as it provides a graphical representation of human comprehension of systems or processes, possibly specialized according to a domain’s semantics – a notion that in the case of this work translates to technology-specific semantics pertaining to PHP Web development
Summary
Recent research in model-driven engineering introduced two novel notions: (a) “technologyspecific” modeling languages, a kind of domain-specific modeling languages where, instead of domain concepts, the language must assimilate technology-specific constructs as first order modeling citizens [1] and (b) “model-aware software engineering” (MASE), a flavor of modeldriven engineering where models interact with running software through semantic technology [2]. The work at hand combines the two notions through a Design Science approach in order to demonstrate the feasibility of MASE for engineering tasks as common as Model-View-Controller (MVC) based Web development in PHP. The artifact reported by this article comprises two components: (a) a technology-specific modeling method for PHP Web. development and (b) demonstrative pages created by applying MASE with input from diagrams created with that method. Design Science [3] was engaged as a research method and MASE [2] as an engineering method, combining Agile Modeling Method Engineering (AMME) [4] (used for the implementation of the diagrammatic modeling tool) with Resource Description Framework (RDF) [5] as semantic bridge between the PHP development environment and the technologyspecific models.
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