Enterprise portals are comprehensive solutions that enable centralized access to information and employees. They also support the business processes taking place in companies. The diversity of functionality offered by enterprise portals is the source of the complexity of the manufacturing process of such applications. Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) are a novel approach to solving problems associated with the software development. By limiting the possibilities of expression to the concepts related to a specific area Domain-Specific Languages are more focused on solving specific problems. The subject of this thesis is DSL SharePoint – Domain-Specific Language which supports the production of enterprise portals on Microsoft SharePoint platform. Language was developed with respect to the newest achievements in area of building DSLs. By applying the language in the industry, it was possible to verify the hypothesis that its usage positively affects the quality of software products. To this end, the quality model was built, and products made with the support of language have been compared to those developed in the traditional manner.

Informational privacy of individuals has significantly gained importance after information technology has become widely deployed. Data, once digitalised, can be copied and distributed at negligible costs. This has dramatic consequences for individuals that leave traces in form of personal data whenever they interact with information technology. The right of individuals for informational privacy, in particular to control the flow and use of their personal data, is easily undermined by those controlling the information technology. The objective of this thesis is the measurement of informational privacy with a particular focus on scenarios where an individual discloses personal data to a second party, the data controller, which uses this data for re-identifying the individual within a set of others, the population. Several instances of this scenario are discussed in the appended papers, most notably one which adds a time dimension to the scenario for modelling the effects of the time passed between data disclosure and usage. This extended scenario leads to a new framework for inter-temporal privacy metrics. The common dilemma of all privacy metrics is their dependence on the information available to the data controller. The same information may or may not be available to the individual and, as a consequence, the individual may be misguided in his decisions due to his limited access to the data controller’s information when using privacy metrics. The goal of this thesis is thus not only the specification of new privacy metrics, but also the contribution of ideas for mitigating this dilemma. However a solution will rather be a combination of technological, economical and legal means than a purely technical solution.

Software verification is an important part of software development and themost practical way to do this today is through dynamic testing. This reportexplains concepts connected to verification and testing and also presents thetesting-framework Trassel developed during the writing of this report.Constructing domain specific languages and tools by using an existinglanguage as a starting ground can be a good strategy for solving certainproblems, this was tried with Trassel where the description-language forwriting test-cases was written as a DSL using Python as the host-language.

Les appareils modernes sont constitués de plusieurs sous-systèmes de différentes sortes qui communiquent et interagissent. L'hétérogénéité de ces sous-systèmes et leurs interactions complexes rendent très délicate leur développement. L'approche d'ingénierie dirigée par les modèles apporte une solution en permettant l'expression de nombreux modèles structurels et comportementaux de natures très diverses. Dans ce contexte, il est nécessaire de construire un modèle unique qui intègre ces différents modèles afin d'y appliquer des méthodes de validation et de vérification pour permettre aux ingénieurs système de comprendre et de valider un comportement global. Cependant, la coordination manuelle des différents modèles qui composent le système est une opération source d'erreurs et les approches automatiques proposent des patrons de coordination ad-hoc pour certaines paires de langages. Dans ces approches, le patron de coordination est souvent encapsulé dans un outil dont il est difficile d'extraire les liens avec le système global. Cette thèse propose le Behavioral Coordination Operator Language (BCOoL), un langage dédié à la spécification de patrons de coordination entre des langages à partir de la définition d'opérateurs de coordination. Ces opérateurs sont employés afin d'automatiser la coordination de modèles exprimés dans ces langages. BCOoL est implémenté comme une suite de plugins qui s'appuient sur l'Eclipse Modeling Framework et présente ainsi un environnement complet pour l'exécution et la vérification de différents modèles coordonnés. / Modern devices embed several subsystems with different characteristics that communicate and interact in many ways. This makes its development complex since a designer has to deal with the heterogeneity of each subsystem but also with the interaction between them. To tackle the development of complex systems, Model Driven Engineering promotes the use of various, possibly heterogeneous, structural and behavioral models. In this context, the coordination of behavioral models to produce a single integrated model is necessary to provide support for validation and verification. It allows system designers to understand and validate the global and emerging behavior of the system. However, the manual coordination of models is tedious and error-prone, and current approaches to automate the coordination are bound to a fixed set of coordination patterns. Moreover, they encode the pattern into a tool thus limiting reasoning on the global system behavior. In this thesis, we propose a Behavioral Coordination Operator Language (B-COoL) to reify coordination patterns between specific domains by using coordination operators between the Domain-Specific Modeling Languages used in these domains. Those operators are then used to automate the coordination of models conforming to these languages. B-COoL is implemented as plugins for the Eclipse Modeling Framework thus providing a complete environment to execute and verify coordinated models. We illustrate the use of B-COoL with the definition of coordination operators between timed finite state machines and activity diagrams. We then use these operators to coordinate and execute the heterogeneous models of a surveillance camera system.

In the thesis I am presenting a plugin in the integrated development environment Eclipse. Plugin is designed to support writing code in JCL programming language. In the first part of the thesis I am focusing on the mainframe platform from the IBM corporation on which the JCL language is used. I also focus on the z/OS operating system and it`s components required for adequate runtime environment for JCL language. In the next section I am discussing the Eclipse environment which is used as runtime platform for the plugin. As a base for the plugin is used an Xtext framework. The framework is specifically designed for development of custom domain specific languages.

Coarse-grained fabrics are comprised of multi-bit configurable logic blocks and configurable interconnect. This work is focused on area and energy optimization techniques for coarse-grained reconfigurable fabric architectures. In this work, a variety of design techniques have been explored to improve the utilization of computational resources and increase energy savings. This includes splitting, folding, multi-level vertical interconnect. In addition to this, I have also studied fully connected homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures, and 3D architecture. I have also examined some of the hybrid strategies of computation unit’s arrangements. In order to perform energy and area analysis, I selected a set of signal and image processing benchmarks from MediaBench suite. I implemented various fabric architectures on 90nm ASIC process from Synopsys. Results show area improvement with energy savings as compared to baseline architecture.

Domain specific languages are sometimes useful to make it easier to express solutions to problems in a specific domain compared to general purpose programming languages. There are a number of tools available to create such languages, either as separate languages or by extending an existing language. One large problem with creating languages or language extensions is that existing tools are unaware of the new language, and therefore unable to properly assist the programmer unless all such tools are extended to support the new language. Extending all tools to support the new language is often a large enough task to be infeasible, especially for small languages. In this thesis, we propose using the compiler of the extensible language Storm to provide the information required for a text editor to provide syntax highlighting and code formatting. By using the Storm compiler to provide the required information, it is possible to use the Storm language definitions for syntax highlighting and code formatting in addition to compiling the language. This means that syntax highlighting and code formatting can be provided without requiring the language author to maintain multiple implementations of the language. The solution is evaluated by comparing the correctness and the responsiveness of the syntax highlighting to Emacs.

Access control policies typically take the form of a set of static rules pertaining to individual entities under control. This can be impractical in real-world scenarios: authorization invariably depends on wider situational context which often tends to be highly dynamic. This leads to increasingly complex rules, which have to change over time to reflect the evolution of the controlled system. Ensemble-based architectures allow dynamic formation of goal-oriented groups in systems with large number of independent autonomous components. Because of the ad-hoc and situation-aware nature of group formation, ensembles offer a novel way of approaching access control. The goal of this work is to design a Scala framework and internal DSL for describing access control related situations via ensembles. In particular, the framework will define ensemble semantics suitable for evaluating the ensembles and establishing access control at runtime.

In the digital age that we live in today, we are dependent on numerous web applications or services, from dealing with banking, booking air flights, and handling our taxes. We expect these applications and services to support high availability, data loss prevention, and fast response time. Microservices is a design pattern to support faster software change, and it also supports other non-functional attributes such as scalability and high availability. One way to deploy your software as microservices is to use containers and deploy them on a container cluster such as Kubernetes. The public opinion about writing Kubernetes deployment files is that it is complex and repetitive writing. This project aims to see how model-driven development can assist with the creation of the Kubernetes deployment files. To see how model-driven development can assist in the creation of Kubernetes files. The project will implement a domain-specific modeling language for Kubernetes, and the language should be able to model the application's desired states. And by using model transformation, the tool can generate Kubernetes deployable files.

Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs) offer constructs that are tailored to better capture the representational needs of an application domain. They provide customized graphical notations, which facilitate understanding of models by domain experts. As a result, DSMLs allow the construction of domain-specific models that support collaboration, improve work processes and enhance decision-making. Given their special purpose, however, a DSML has to be built each time a new application domain is to be addressed, which is quite demanding and time-consuming. A valid alternative is the creation of DSMLs through domain-specific adaptations of existing modelling languages. This solution has the benefits of starting from a baseline of well-known concepts, which is adapted to fit a specific purpose. Current engineering processes for building or adapting modelling languages, however, lack agility. It follows a sequential engineering lifecycle, where modelling and evaluation activities cannot start before the DSML is deployed for use. Such a sequential approach tends to keep the language engineer separate from the domain expert, who is hindered from gaining experience from the DSML until it is created. The separation of the two roles is a threat to the high quality of the DSML as it requires the joint effort of both experts. On the other hand, the new requirements that arise from the suggestions of the domain expert have to go through the whole engineering lifecycle (i.e. capture and document the requirement, conceptualise, implement and deploy), which is time-consuming. These current drawbacks of present engineering processes have been explored in two case studies, which report the development of a DSML for Patient Transferal Management and a DSML for Business Process as a Service. In this research an agile meta-modelling approach has been conceived to address the identified drawbacks. Specifically, the approach allows the quick interleaving of language engineering, modelling and evaluation activities. Hence, the close cooperation between the language engineers and the domain experts is fostered from an early stage. A set of operators are proposed to enable on-the-fly domain-specific adaptations of modelling languages, thus avoiding the sequential engineering phases. This agile meta-modelling aims to promote both the high-quality and quick development of DSMLs through domain-specific adaptations. Moreover, to avoid misinterpretation of the meaning of the newly created modelling constructs as well as ensuring machine interpretability of models, the agile meta-modelling has been supplemented by an ontology-aided approach. The latter embeds the specification specifications of modelling languages into an ontology. A set of semantic rules are proposed to support the propagation of language adaptations from the graphical to the machine-interpretable representation. In turn, the approach was developed in the modelling environment AOAME, which allows preserving consistency between the graphical and the machine-interpretable knowledge while domain-specific adaptations are performed. An evaluation strategy is proposed, from which three criteria were derived to evaluate the approach. Firstly, the correct design of the approach is evaluated by the extent to which it satisfies the requirements. Secondly, the operationability of the approach is evaluated by its ability to preserve consistency between the graphical and the machine-interpretable representations. Thirdly, the generality of the approach is evaluated by its ability to be applied in different application domains. The evaluation of operationability and generality are supported by implementing real-world use cases in AOAME. Consequently, the approach contributes to the practice in three different application domains, the Patient Transferal Management, Business Process as a Service and Innovation Processes. The scientific contribution of the approach spans research fields of Domain-Specific Modelling Language, Meta-Modelling, Enterprise Modelling and Ontologies. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Informatics / PhD (Information Systems) / Unrestricted