apis 1 - Automatic Production of Information Systems

1 Synopsis The objective of the apis research project is to develop a case tool that generates exe-cutable information systems (IS) from formal specifications (abstract models). In other words, apis aims at automating as much as possible the production of IS by lifting the level of abstraction at which software designers work. Instead of spending most of their time designing, programming and testing at a very low level of abstraction, software designers will be able to concentrate on specifying and validating; the apis case tool will take care of generating an executable system from the specification. The foundations of the case tool are abstract models of IS (formal functional specifications) and algorithms that generates an executable system from these models (model-based interface development environment – MB-IDE), and specification interpretation. The apis project has to a) define a comprehensive set of integrated models for information systems, b) develop new algorithms for specification interpretation and code generation, and c) implement them in a case tool. The eb 3 specification language will be the foundation for the models [5]. It is a formal, object-oriented, executable language which is very well adapted for the functional specification of IS. eb 3 will be supplemented with a language to specify graphical user interfaces (GUI) in order to have a comprehensive model of an IS. The apis project will be the first to study the automation of information systems production from formal specifications. The success of the apis project would represent a significant breakthrough in terms of productivity and quality in IS development. apis could cut up to 50 % of the cost of IS development, because it would relieve software designers from design, programming and testing. Consequently, it would also avoid faults introduced during these activities. IS are generally characterized by large data structures which are modified or queried by several users in concurrency. The difficulty of these systems typically resides in managing complex relationships between data structures, in complex calculations involving several data structures, in processing large volume of data, and in preserving data integrity through concurrent updates by several users. IS typically have little hard real-time constraints or inter-process communication. An IS can be decomposed in three parts: i) the functional behavior (also called business logic), ii) the user interface , and iii) the database. The functional behavior defines the transactions of the system, which are of two types: a) update transactions modify the …