Eingeladener Vortrag des Instituts für Softwaretechnologie

Thomas Büchner
Lehrstuhl für Informatik 19 (sebis), TU München

Anpassung von Frameworks mit Hilfe eines introspektiven Frameworks

Dienstag, 5. Juni 2007


We focus on the integration of domain-specific models with the underlying system. Integration improves overall consistency and enables features like navigation, search for references, and refactoring. Based on the observation, that the prevailing generative model-driven approach provides poor integration, we present a new approach to model-driven development, which we call introspective model-driven development (IMDD).

The main idea of IMDD is to use introspective frameworks, which annotate their extension points explicitly. This enables the automatic extraction of the metamodel and the visualization of the models. There are introspective blackbox and whitebox frameworks. Introspective whitebox frameworks enable the integration of domain-specific models with handwritten code and other models.

To evaluate our approach, we built an introspective platform (on top of Java and the Eclipse IDE), which out of the box supports the introspection of blackbox and whitebox frameworks. Furthermore, we describe the web application platform Toro as an example of introspective model driven development. Toro itself is an introspective blackbox framework and consists of several introspective whitebox frameworks. We show in detail, how three of these frameworks are implemented and how they benefit from introspection. This includes an introspective persistence and web interaction framework.