A Reference Model for the Analysis and Comparison of MDE Approaches for Web-Application Development

Abstract

The emerging Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) paradigm advocates the use of models as first-class citizens in the software development process, while artifacts such as documentation and source-code can be quickly produced from those models by using automated transformations. Even though many MDE-oriented approaches, languages and tools have been developed in the recent past, there is no standard that concretely defines a specific sequence of steps to obtain a functional software system from a model. Thus, the existing approaches present numerous differences among themselves, because each one handles the problems inherent to software development in its own way. This paper presents and discusses a reference model for the comparative study of current MDE approaches in the scope of web-application development. This reference model focuses on relevant aspects such as modeling language scope (domain, business-logic, user-interface), usage of patterns, separation of concerns, model transformations, tool support, and deployment details like web-platform independence and traditional programming required. The ultimate goal of this paper is to determine the aspects that will be of greater importance in future web-oriented MDE languages.