• Background

• Overview
• Lightweight XML-models Transformations
• Bottom-up Domain-Specific Modeling

Overview

NReco introduces a number of techniques for organizing effective component-based and domain-specific model-driven development:

• bottom-up domain-specific modeling process
• lightweight XML-models transformation approach
• components composition model
• concept merging build approach (generalization tree)
• semantic search engine

Lightweight XML-models Transformations

Main idea is using IoC-container XML-configuration as final model in transformation chain. This approach offers a lot of benefits:

• transformation rules could be expressed using powerful and well-known XSLT
• requires only XML-to-XML transformations
• easy to maintain (changes, versions, etc)
• great opportunity for transformation rules reuse (recursive transformations)
• efficient model interpretation (no code generation!)
• supports domain-specific multimodeling paradigm (when used as common final model representation)

This approach to XML-models transformation based on assumption that model in form of domain-specific concept map (semantic network) ideally suits for describing domain knowledge (facts/rules etc). IoC-container XML configuration also can be treated as trivial kind of concept map (where objects are 'concepts' and arcs are relations of only one kind: 'depends from' ('uses')). Objects (concepts) actually are organized into taxonomy (classes hierarchy); by their nature in this case objects could represent almost any basic concept. It's very easy to prove that any concept map may be represented as IoC container XML configuration; this means that custom domain-specific XML-schema may be used for describing XML-models and it always can be transformed to IoC container configuration (using XSL for instance). Overall model complexity can be divided between 2 layers: transformation definitions and concept classes. Trivial transformation rules could be used when classes are very close to domain concepts; transformation rules may become very complex in conditions when limited amount of abstract classes used for representing domain concepts. Actually this is one more parameter available for software developers; it affects such aspects as performance, reusability, maintainability, interoperability etc.

Read more details in articles and white papers/supporting materials.

Bottom-up Domain-Specific Modeling

Term "bottom-up" refers to process of creating domain-specific model specification. It supposes that DSM specification should be designed in respect to existent DSM models and components: actually it represents pragmatic approach to model driven development.