Megamodels as models of the linguistic architecture of software products …softlang/models12/ipa... · 2012. 4. 21. · • Co-founder of SLE conference series ... Figure 1 summarizes

© 2012, 101companies

Megamodels as models of the linguistic architecture of software

products and software technologies

Ralf Lämmel (Software Languages Team) on behalf ofJean-Marie Favre, Thomas Schmorleiz, and Andrei Varanovich

19 April 2012

http://101companies.org

http://101companies.org/



Speaker bio Ralf Lämmel

• Professor of CS at University of Koblenz-Landau

• Leader of the Software Languages Team @ Koblenz

• Co-founder of SLE conference series

• Co-founder of GTTSE summer school series

• Previous jobs: MSFT, VU (A’dam), CWI, Uni Rostock

• Interests: languages, grammars, software language engineering, software linguistics, transformations, automation, lambdas, programs, technologies, understanding, ...

Casualty of social networks


Context: Technical space travel for developers,

researchers, and educators in the 101companies project.


Technical space travel for developers, researchers, and educators

What’s a technical space?


Technical space= Technology and community context

in software engineering

• Objectware (more specifically: Javaware)

• Modelware

• Grammarware

• XMLware

• Ontoware

• Tableware (aka Tupleware, Dataware)

• ...



What’s technical space travel?


Technical space travel

• Abstractly:

‣ Handle multiple technical spaces simultaneously

‣ Less dramatically

• Handle multiple technologies simultaneously

• Acquire skills for a new technology

• Concretely:

‣ Master Object/Relational/XML mapping

‣ Master domain-specific languages


Too much technologies. Too little time.EMF

SQL

TENEO

Java

XSD

DOM

Antlr

OWL

UML

XMI

Ecore

SQL DDL

XLSTSaxon

Hibernate

Awk

Json

Yacc

JAXP

RestOWL

RDF

ATOM

SparQLXSLT

DTD

BNF

XSD

OCL

Prolog

grep

MOF

OMG

QVT

jDOMRose

Protegé

XQuery

ODM

XMLSpy

JPA

JAXB

JDBC

ODBC

MySQLArgoUML

Jean

Jena

Jena

Ralf

Dragan

TXL

VLDB

EMF.gen

ORACLE

TCS

XText

Teneo

Jersey

GWT

Sesame

Stratego

XPATH

JeanBeans

UTF8

ASCII

RDFa

RDF(S)

RDFS

CFG

LALR

ER

SLE2010xerces

xalan

saxonsax

sed

XSD

JMI JMF

SBVR


EMF

SQL

TENEO

Java

XSD

DOM

Antlr

OWL

UML

XMI

Ecore

SQL DDL

XLSTSaxon

Hibernate

Awk

Json

Yacc

JAXP

RestOWL

RDF

ATOM

SparQLXSLT

DTD

BNF

XSD

OCL

Prolog

grep

MOF

OMG

QVT

jDOMRose

Protegé

XQuery

ODM

XMLSpy

JPA

JAXB

JDBC

ODBC

MySQLArgoUML

Jean

Jena

Jena

Ralf

Dragan

TXL

VLDB

EMF.gen

ORACLE

TCS

XText

Teneo

Jersey

GWT

Sesame

Stratego

XPATH

JeanBeans

UTF8

ASCII

RDFa

RDF(S)

RDFS

CFG

LALR

ER

SLE2010xerces

xalan

saxonsax

sed

XSD

JMI JMF

SBVR

Issues with software technologies

• Silos of knowledge• Combining technologies• Complexity of technologies• Entering a new space• Teaching technologies



Developers may need to travel like this.How do we care as researchers?How do we care as educators?


Why would you study computer science, if your ultimate destiny is

to get lost in space and technology?

The student-centric view


Popular faculty opinion 1

Practice is terribly complex.University should not bother.



Practice is too complex.University can not bother.



Practice is incidentally complex.University must not bother.


Proposed opinion shift

Practice is amazingly complex and does not go away.University and research should, can, and must bother and help.



http://www.fotocommunity.de/pc/pc/display/18564779

Tim

e to

let

the

cat

out

of t

he b

ag.




EMF

SQL

TENEO

Java

XSD

DOM

Antlr

OWL

UML

XMI

Ecore

SQL DDL

XLSTSaxon

Hibernate

Awk

Json

Yacc

JAXP

RestOWL

RDF

ATOM

SparQLXSLT

DTD

BNF

XSD

OCL

Prolog

grep

MOF

OMG

QVT

jDOMRose

Protegé

XQuery

ODM

XMLSpy

JPA

JAXB

JDBC

ODBC

MySQLArgoUML

Jean

Jena

Jena

Ralf

Dragan

TXL

VLDB

EMF.gen

ORACLE

TCS

XText

Teneo

Jersey

GWT

Sesame

Stratego

XPATH

JeanBeans

UTF8

ASCII

RDFa

RDF(S)

RDFS

CFG

LALR

ER

SLE2010xerces

xalan

saxonsax

sed

XSD

JMI JMF

SBVR

• Silos of knowledge• Combining technologies• Complexity of technologies• Entering a new space• Teaching technologies?

Issues with software technologies

• analogies• examples• abstractions

In need of ...


•Analogies

• Examples

• Abstractions


MOF XSD RDFS SQL.DDL EBNF

OCLXPath

QVT

XQuery SPARQL SQL

ProtégéTopbeard

XMLSpyVS-XML

ArgoUMLRose

MySQLOracle

XSLT TXLASF

MetaEnv.

XMLVLDB

MoDELSECMDA

ICSWESWC

VLDBSIGMOD

CCPOPL

Metalanguage

Navigation

Query

Transfo.

Toolkit

Conferences

Modelware XMLware Ontoware Tableware Grammarware

Sesame


Analogy in space travel

XMIModelware XMLware

Javaware

JDBC

Dataware

JDOM

Ontoware

JenaHibernate

EMF.genJMITeneo JAXB

JPA


Use of an ontology (taxonomy) for the organization of technologies and languages

21


Use of an ontology (taxonomy) for the organization of technologies and languages

22


• Analogies

•Examples

• Abstractions


Implement many Human Resources Management Systems

Company X:Swing + JDBC

Company Y:SWT + Hibernate

Company Z:GWT + MongoDB

...

Many different implementations

(and specifications) of about the

same, in fact, feature-wise differing

human-resources management

system using different software

technologies and software languages.

http://101companies.org




Basic data model of the HRMS


Demo

$ pwd

/Users/laemmel/101companies/contributions/html5local

$ open index.html


Basic features of the HRMS

Total salaries

Cut salaries

Serialize companies


The feature model of the HRMS

Total salaries

Cut salaries

Persist companies

Parallelize operations

All features are optional.


Distribution of files for 101companies implementations

# F

iles

Implementations


Distribution of LOC for 101companies implementations

LOC

Implementations


Technologies used in 101companies implementations


Languages used in 101companies implementations


Demo


Plan for the demo

• Start at 101companies landing page.

• Enter search string HTML5

• Browse github for HTML5 implementation

• Explore wiki:‣ Themes of implementations

• The Web programming theme

• The Java mapping theme‣ Feature model‣ Ontology

• Show resources


• Analogies

• Examples

•Abstractions


What is the essence of technology xyz?


Summary: why is 101companies important and how to contribute?

Think of SE/PL courses

Technology adoption

Semantic web

Compare to Stack Overflow

Compare to Wikipedia


Meat: Megamodels as models of the linguistic architecture of software products and

software technologies.


What’s a megamodel?

UsesMegaL/yEd


What’s a megamodel?

UsesMegaL/yEd


The notion of megamodel

• Megamodels are (ER) models.

• Entities of interest‣ Languages‣ Technologies (components thereof)‣ Programs‣ ...

• Relationships of interest‣ Conformance‣ Transformation‣ ...


That’s a megamodel, too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tombstone_diagram




Yet another megamodel!ATL Documentations !

! ATL Starter’s Guide Date 07/12/2005

Page 2!

MMM

MMt

Ma Mb

MMa

Mt

MMb

conformsTo

conformsTo conformsTo

conformsTo

conformsTo

conformsTo

Transformation

MMMMMM

MMtMMt

MaMa MbMb

MMaMMa

MtMt

MMbMMb

conformsTo

conformsTo conformsTo

conformsTo

conformsTo

conformsTo

Transformation Figure 1. An overview of model transformation

Figure 1 summarizes the full model transformation process. A model Ma, conforming to a metamodel MMa, is here transformed into a model Mb that conforms to a metamodel MMb. The transformation is defined by the model transformation model Mt which itself conforms to a model transformation metamodel MMt. This last metamodel, along with the MMa and MMb metamodels, has to conform to a metametamodel (such as MOF or Ecore).

3 A simple transformation example This section introduces the transformation example that is going to be developed in the document. The aim of this first example is to introduce users with the basic concepts of the ATL programming. To this end, this example considers two similar metamodels, Author (Figure 2) and Person (Figure 3), that both encode data relative to persons.

Figure 2. The Author metamodel

Figure 3. The Person metamodel

Both metamodels are composed of a single eponym element: Author for the Author metamodel and Person for the Person metamodel. Both entities are characterized by the same couple of string properties (name and surname). The objective is here to design an ATL transformation enabling to generate a Person model from an Author model. The transformation to be designed will have to implement the following (obvious) semantics:

• A distinct Person element is generated for each source Author element; o The name of the generated Person has to be initialized with the name of the source

Author; o The surname of the generated Person has to be initialized with the name of the

source Author.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/ATL/Concepts#Model_Transformation

Model transformations

with ATLWhat to think of this part?




That’s nearly the same megamodel.2.3. Model-Driven Engineering 33

Transformation

TransformationMetamodel

TransformationModel

Metametamodel

MetamodelMetamodel

Model Model

conforms to

conforms to

conforms toconforms to

conforms to

conforms to

source+

target+

represented bysource+target+

Figure 2.6: Model transformation megamodel

pressions in the Object Constraint Language1 (OCL) to select the elementsin the source model to transform. OCL is a declarative language, originallydeveloped to specify constraints over UML models.

The MDE pattern or megamodel for model transformations is depictedin Figure 2.6 [Bézivin et al., 2005]. With MDE a Transformation between asource and target Model is defined by a transformation language. Whenthis language is defined by a TransformationModelMetamodel, the transforma-tion definition is in fact a model itself. This TransformationModel specifiestransformations of source into target models in terms of the Metamodelsthey conform to. In correspondence with the metamodelling megamodel inFigure 2.3 on page 30, all involved metamodels conform to a single Metameta-

model.

A transformation engine (automatically) transforms source models thatconform to the source metamodel into target models that conform to thetarget metamodel as described in the transformation definition. As such,transformation engines require several inputs: source model, source meta-model, target metamodel, and transformation definition.

Many different types of model transformations and model transfor-mation languages are conceivable. Sendall [2003]; Czarnecki and Helsen[2006]; and Mens and Van Gorp [2006] each give a number of propertiesof model transformation languages. These include the type and numberof source and target models, horizontal vs. vertical transformations (withrespect to abstraction level), type of notation (e.g., graphical vs. textual),source-target relationship (new vs. in-place), and many more.

1http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/modeling_spec_catalog.htm#OCL (June 2007)

Bas Graaf: Model-Driven Evolution of Software Architectures, Dissertation, Delft University of Technology, 2007.

Model transformations

Is this is a function or an application thereof?


Megamodel of O/X mapping with xsd.exe

UsesMegaL/yEd

http://softlang.uni-koblenz.de/mega/

http://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~softlang/mega/

http://userpages.uni-koblenz.de/~softlang/mega/


Megamodel of a software product

UsesMegaL/yEd


Research questions

• Can we do heavy lifting with megamodeling?

• Does a general megamodeling language exist?

‣ What are the entities of linguistic architecture?

‣ What are the relationships of interest?

‣ (What is a good visual syntax?)

• How to validate megamodels?


Heavy lifting with megamodeling

Claim by this speaker:

Megamodeling lifts heavily once it can explain, for example,

Object/Relational/XML mapping at a high level of

abstraction in a comprehensible and falsifiable manner.

More generally, megamodeling must help with managing diversity and heterogeneity of software technologies.


The upper frame uses the MegaL/yEd visual notation for megamodeling.

The lower frame shows some linked artifacts explained later in the paper.

Fig. 1. The linguistic architecture of a software product when displayed with the Me-gaL/Explorer tool.

technology for Object/XML mapping are clearly identifiable. Consider, for ex-

ample, the fact that the class generator is not described as generating ‘arbitrary’

C#. Instead, a designated subset, CSharpFromXsd, is used because the genera-

tor indeed produces very regular code whose regularity helps with understanding

Object/XML mapping, as we discuss later.

Demo


Dependencies of implementation


MegaL/yEd







Cont’d



MegaL -- summary

• Entities and relationships

• Types relate to 101companies ontology

• Actual entities or placeholders thereof

• MegaL/yEd: visual notation

• MegaL/Txt: textual notation

• MegaL/RDF: RDF representation

• Binding: Turn placeholders into entities

• Linking: Link online artifacts to entities


A megamodel for Object/XML mapping

http://black42.uni-koblenz.de/production/101worker/MegaModels/capabilities/Object_XML_mapping/MegaL/






Conclusion

• 101companies helps technological space travelers.

• Megamodels model linguistic architecture.

• Finally, we understand Object/XML mapping.

• There is going to be a related summer school in Koblenz:

SoTeSoLa -- Software Technologies and Software Languages

Thanks!Questions?

Documents

Megamodels as models of the linguistic architecture of software products …softlang/models12/ipa... · 2012. 4. 21. · • Co-founder of SLE conference series ... Figure 1 summarizes