This thesis creates a Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) implementation and integration inside the iipax case handling software. The implementation investigated advantages with Domain-Specific Languages. Following agile software development methods the paper results in a functioning Domain-Specific Language emulating written English. / I denna rapport utvecklas ett Domän-Specifikt Språk (DSL) och integreras i ärehanterings systemet iipax. Implementationen undersökte fördelar med Domän-Specifika Språk. Rapporten ägnade sig åt agil mjukvaruutveckling och resulterade i ett fungerande Domän-Specifikt Språk som efterliknandar engelska.

The topic of the thesis are domain-specific languages (DSL) and their use in software development. The target audience are developers interested in learning more about this progressive area of software development. It starts with a necessary theoretical introduction to programming languages. Then, a classification of DSLs is given and software development methodologies based on DSLs are described, notably Language Oriented Programming and Intentional Programming. Another important piece in construction of domain-specific langauges -- the language workbench is also described. In the next chapter, several important tools for DSL creation are presented, described and compared. Each of the tools represents a different possible approach to designing DSLs -- textual, projectional or graphical. The last chapter of the thesis contains a practical example of a DSL implementation in the Meta Programming System by Jet- Brains and Xtext from Eclipse. A domain-specific language for the description of questionnaires is designed from scratch and a code generator for that language is created. A comparison of the DSL based technique to traditional software development techniques is given and the tools used are compared.

Modern search engines like Google support domain-independent search over the vast information contained in web documents. However domain-specific information access, such as finding less well-known people, locations, and events are not performed efficiently without users developing sophisticated query strategies. This thesis describes the design and development of an application to support one such domain-specific information activity: for insurance (and related) companies to identify weather and natural disaster damage to better assess when and where personnel will be needed. The approach presented to supporting such activity combines information extraction with an interactive presentation of results. Previous domain specific search engines extract information about papers, people, and course information using rule-based or learningbased techniques. However they use the results of information extraction in a typical query and list of results interface. They fail to address the need for interaction based on the extracted document features. The domain specific web-based search application developed in this project combines information extraction with the interactive display of results to facilitate rapid information location. A heuristic evaluation was performed to determine whether the application met the design goals and to improve the design. Thus the final application has an unconventional but interactive presentation of the results with the use of tree based display. The application also allows options for user specific results caching and modification of the search and caching process. With a heuristic based search process it extracts information about place, date and damages regarding a specific disaster using a bank of search heuristics developed.

Rapid advances in electronic communication devices and technologies have resulted in a shift in the way communication applications are being developed. These new development strategies provide abstract views of the underlying communication technologies and lead to the so-called user-centric communication applications. One user-centric communication (UCC) initiative is the Communication Virtual Machine (CVM) technology, which uses the Communication Modeling Language (CML) for modeling communication services and the CVM for realizing these services. In communication-intensive domains such as telemedicine and disaster management, there is an increasing need for user-centric communication applications that are domain-specific and that support the dynamic coordination of communication services commonly found in collaborative communication scenarios. However, UCC approaches like the CVM offer little support for the dynamic coordination of communication services resulting from inherent dependencies between individual steps of a collaboration task. Users either have to manually coordinate communication services, or reply on a process modeling technique to build customized solutions for services in a specific domain that are usually costly, rigidly defined and technology specific. This dissertation proposes a domain-specific modeling approach to address this problem by extending the CVM technology with communication-specific abstractions of workflow concepts commonly found in business processes. The extension involves (1) the definition of the Workflow Communication Modeling Language (WF-CML), a superset of CML, and (2) the extension of the functionality of CVM to process communication-specific workflows. The definition of WF-CML includes the metamodel and the dynamic semantics for control constructs and concurrency. We also extended the CVM prototype to handle the modeling and realization of WF-CML models. A comparative study of the proposed approach with other workflow environments validates the claimed benefits of WF-CML and CVM.

It is becoming more and more common for developers to build enterprise applications on Spring framework or other other Java frameworks. While the developers are enjoying the convenient implementations of web frameworks, developers should pay attention to con- figuration deployment with metadata usage (i.e., Java annotations and XML deployment descriptors). Different formats of metadata can correspond to each other. Metadata usually exist in multiple files. Maintaining such metadata is challenging and time-consuming. Cur- rent compilers and research tools rarely inspect the XML files, not to say the corresponding relationship between Java annotations and XML files. To help developers ensure the quality of metadata, this work presents a Domain Specific Language, RSL, and its engine, MeEditor. RSL facilitates pattern definition for correct metadata usage. MeEditor can take in specified rules and check Java projects for any rule violations. Developer can define rules with RSL considering the metadata usage. Then, developers can run RSL script with MeEditor. 9 rules were extracted from Spring specification and are written in RSL. To evaluate the effectiveness and correctness of MeEditor, we mined 180 plus 500 open-source projects from Github. To evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of MeEditor, we conducted our evaluation by taking two steps. First, we evaluated the effec- tiveness of MeEditor by constructing a know ground truth data set. Based on experiments of ground truth data set, MeEditor can identified the metadata misuse. MeEditor detected bug with 94% precision, 94% recall, 94% accuracy. Second, we evaluate the usefulness of MeEditor by applying it to real world projects (total 500 projects). For the latest version of these 500 projects, MeEditor gave 79% precision according to our manual inspection. Then, we applied MeEditor to the version histories of rule-adopted projects, which adopt the rule and is identified as correct project for latest version. MeEditor identified 23 bugs, which later fixed by developers. / Master of Science / It is becoming more and more common for developers to build enterprise applications on Spring framework or other other Java frameworks. While the developers are enjoying the convenient implementations of web frameworks, developers should pay attention to con- figuration deployment with metadata usage (i.e., Java annotations and XML deployment descriptors). Different formats of metadata can correspond to each other. Metadata usually exist in multiple files. Maintaining such metadata is challenging and time-consuming. Cur- rent compilers and research tools rarely inspect the XML files, not to say the corresponding relationship between Java annotations and XML files. To help developers ensure the quality of metadata, this work presents a Domain Specific Language, RSL, and its engine, MeEditor. RSL facilitates pattern definition for correct metadata usage. MeEditor can take in specified rules and check Java projects for any rule violations. Developer can define rules with RSL considering the metadata usage. Then, developers can run RSL script with MeEditor. 9 rules were extracted from Spring specification and are written in RSL. To evaluate the effectiveness and correctness of MeEditor, we mined 180 plus 500 open-source projects from Github. To evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of MeEditor, we conducted our evaluation by taking two steps. First, we evaluated the effectiveness of MeEditor by constructing a know ground truth data set. Based on experiments of ground truth data set, MeEditor can identified the metadata misuse. MeEditor detected bug with 94% precision, 94% recall, 94% accuracy. Second, we evaluate the usefulness of MeEditor by applying it to real world projects (total 500 projects). For the latest version of these 500 projects, MeEditor gave 79% precision according to our manual inspection. Then, we applied MeEditor to the version histories of rule-adopted projects, which adopt the rule and is identified as correct project for latest version. MeEditor identified 23 bugs, which later fixed by developers.

Model-driven development has been considered to be the hope of improving software productivity significantly. However, it has not been achieved even after many years of research and application. Models are only and still used at the analysis and design stage, furthermore, models gradually deviate from system implementation. The thesis integrates domain-specific modelling and web service techniques with model-driven development and proposes a unified approach, SODSMI (Service Oriented executable Domain-Specific Modelling and Implementation), to build the executable domain-specific model and to achieve the target of model-driven development. The approach is organised by domain space at architectural level which is the elementary unit of the domain-specific modelling and implementation framework. The research of SODSMI is made up of three main parts: Firstly, xDSM (eXecutable Domain-Specific Model) is proposed as the core construction for domain-specific modelling. Behaviour scenario is adopted to build the meta-modelling framework for xDSM. Secondly, XDML language (eXecutable Domain-specific Meta-modelling Language) is designed to describe the xDSM meta-model and its application model. Thirdly, DSMEI (Domain-Specific Model Execution Infrastructure) is designed as the execution environment for xDSM. Web services are adopted as the implementation entities mapping to core functions of xDSM so as to achieve the service-oriented domain-specific application. The thesis embodies the core value of model and provides a feasible approach to achieve real model-driven development from modelling to system implementation which makes domain-specific software development and reuse coming true.

When developing domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), software engineers have to make a number of important design decisions on the DSML itself, or on the software-development process that is applied to develop the DSML. Thus, making well-informed design decisions is a critical factor in developing DSMLs. To support this decision-making process, the model-driven development community has started to collect established design practices in terms of patterns, guidelines, story-telling, and procedural models. However, most of these documentation practices do not capture the details necessary to reuse the rationale behind these decisions in other DSML projects. In this paper, we report on a three-year research effort to compile and to empirically validate a catalog of structured decision descriptions (decision records) for UML-based DSMLs. This catalog is based on design decisions extracted from 90 DSML projects. These projects were identified - among others - via an extensive systematic literature review (SLR) for the years 2005 - 2012. Based on more than 8,000 candidate publications, we finally selected 84 publications for extracting design-decision data. The extracted data were evaluated quantitatively using a frequent-item-set analysis to obtain characteristic combinations of design decisions and qualitatively to document recurring documentation issues for UML-based DSMLs. We revised the collected decision records based on this evidence and made the decision-record catalog for developing UML-based DSMLs publicly available. Furthermore, our study offers insights into UML usage (e.g. diagram types) and into the adoption of UML extension techniques (e.g. metamodel extensions, profiles).

Today it is realized by industry that automation of software development leads to increased productivity, maintainability and higher quality. Model-Driven Development (MDD) aims to replace manual software development methods by automated methods using Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to express domain concepts effectively. Main actors in software industry, Microsoft and IBM have recognized the need to provide technologies and tools to allow building DSLs to support MDD. On the one hand, Microsoft is building DSL Tools integrated in Visual Studio 2005; on the other hand IBM is contributing to the development of Eclipse Modeling Frameworks (EMF/GEF/GMF), both tools aim to make development and deployment of DSLs easier. Software practitioners seek for guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools. In this thesis, the author presents the current state-of-the-art in MDD standards and Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM). Furthermore, the author presents current state-of-the-tools for DSM and performs a comparison of Microsoft DSL Tools and Eclipse EMF/GEF/GMF Frameworks based on a set of evaluation criteria. For the purpose of comparison the author developed two DSL designers (one by using each DSM tool). Based on the experiences gained in development of these DSL designers, the author prepared guidelines regarding how to adopt these tools to existing development environments as well as their advantages and drawbacks.

Requirements are a key aspect of software development. Requirements are also related with other software artefacts including designs, test cases and documentation. These artefacts are often captured with specialized models. However, many tools lack support for traceability relationships between requirements artefacts and model artefacts, leading to analysis issues. To establish traceability between models and other types of requirements artefacts, this thesis proposes a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for describing the concepts of a modeling language that would be intended to be traced using a Requirements Management System (RMS), with tool support handling the evolution of models and of their traceability links. In the first part of this thesis, the syntax and metamodel of the Model Traceability DSL (MT-DSL) are defined, together with an editor implemented using Xtext. In the second part of the thesis, a library of import and maintenance functions is generated automatically (using Xtend) from model traceability descriptions written using MT-DSL. The target language for this library is the DOORS eXtension Language (DXL), the scripting language of a leading commercial RMS with traceability support, namely IBM Rational DOORS. The implementation has been tested successfully for importing and evolution scenarios with two different modeling languages (User Requirements Notation and Finite State Machines). This work hence contributes a reliable mechanism to define and support traceability between requirements and models.

Requirements are a key aspect of software development. Requirements are also related with other software artefacts including designs, test cases and documentation. These artefacts are often captured with specialized models. However, many tools lack support for traceability relationships between requirements artefacts and model artefacts, leading to analysis issues. To establish traceability between models and other types of requirements artefacts, this thesis proposes a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for describing the concepts of a modeling language that would be intended to be traced using a Requirements Management System (RMS), with tool support handling the evolution of models and of their traceability links. In the first part of this thesis, the syntax and metamodel of the Model Traceability DSL (MT-DSL) are defined, together with an editor implemented using Xtext. In the second part of the thesis, a library of import and maintenance functions is generated automatically (using Xtend) from model traceability descriptions written using MT-DSL. The target language for this library is the DOORS eXtension Language (DXL), the scripting language of a leading commercial RMS with traceability support, namely IBM Rational DOORS. The implementation has been tested successfully for importing and evolution scenarios with two different modeling languages (User Requirements Notation and Finite State Machines). This work hence contributes a reliable mechanism to define and support traceability between requirements and models.