TO BUILD OPEN AND EVOLUTIVE APPLICATIONS: AN APPROACH BASED ON MDA AND GENERATIVE PROGRAMMING

With the emergence of the Internet and proliferation of new component and distributive technologies, the design and implementation of complex applications has to take into account standards, code distribution, deployment of components and reuse of business know-hows. To cope with these changes, applications need to be more open, adaptable and evolutive. To accommodate to these new challenges, this paper presents a new development approach based on transformations of different business models, each of them related to one possible concern of the application. This approach is MDA (Model-driven Architecture) compliant and relies on Generative Programming. It contributes to the research works on Domain Driven Development (DDD). The main expected results are i) to get softwares of better quality thanks to business models and technology separation, ii) to have a more straightforward code, iii) to allow the rapid development and insertion of new facets and iv) to facilitate the portability of applications towards new technologies or platforms. Finaly, in order to illustrate our approach, a generative programming system, called SMARTTOOLS, is presented. It may be compared to a software factory dedicated to applications which rely on one data model. This project is supported in part by the W3C consortiun with the IST2000-28767 QUESTION-HOW Project. We would also like to thank PASCAL DEGENNE and ALEXANDRE FAU for their software development efforts in SMARTTOOLS.