Abstract
The state of a state machine is a path between two actions; however, it is the rest of the world who walks the path. The development of a web application, especially of an information system, starts with use cases, i.e., model scenarios of how users interact with the application and its entities. The goal of this paper is to turn the use cases into a useful specification and automatically convert them into a model layer of a web application, in our case using finite automata. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides a graphical syntax to capture the use cases, which is based on the theoretical background of Petri Nets. However, because BPMN does not capture the state of the modeled entities, it is impractical to use it as a specification of a persistent storage and model layers of the web application. To overcome this problem, we propose a new STS algorithm to infer a finite automaton that implements a chosen participant in a BPMN diagram that represents a given entity of the web application.
Highlights
A customer and a software architect are sitting at a table
Our goal is to introduce a connection between the use cases in the form of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagrams and a Smalldb state machine [1] that implements a participant of
The result we present in this paper is the STS algorithm, which inspects interactions of a chosen participant in a BPMN diagram and generates a state diagram of a Smalldb state machine that implements the modeled behavior of the participant
Summary
A customer and a software architect are sitting at a table. The customer is describing what she wants and how it should fit into business processes in her company. In a BPMN diagram presenting the basic use of an HTML form, see Fig. 2, there will be two participants, namely, the user utilizing a web browser and the server-side resource (the state machine). The Smalldb state machine is an abstract construct that combines a formal state diagram with a transitions implementation (executable code) and persistent storage (typically an SQL database) to implement the desired model layer of the web application. The nondeterminism of the Smalldb state machine represents various possible outcomes of an action (transition) invoked by a user This approach is equivalent to the use of guards on deterministic finite automata, but practically, the information required to evaluate the guard is not available at the time of invocation of the transition because there may be unpredictable external influences or it may just be too complicated to model. The activities of the external entities form a path from one automaton’s transition to another, connecting its output events to its input events
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