Low-level variability support for web-based software product lines

The Web systems domain has faced an increasing number of devices, browsers, and platforms to cope with, driving software systems to be more flexible to accomodate them. Software product line (SPL) engineering can be used as a strategy to implement systems capable of handling such a diversity. To this end, automated tool support is almost indispensable. However, current tool support gives more emphasis to modeling variability in the problem domain, over the support of variability at the solution domain. There is a need for mapping the variability between both abstraction levels, so as to determine what implementation impact a certain variability has. In this paper, we propose the FeatureJS, a FeatureIDE extension aiming at Javascript and HTML support for SPL engineering. The tool combines feature-oriented programming and preprocessors, as a strategy to map variability at source code with the variability modeled at a higher level of abstraction. We carried out a preliminary evaluation with an industrial project, aiming to characterize the capability of the tool to handle SPL engineering in the Web systems domain.