A Model Framework Weaving Approach Position Paper

Current development approaches Nowadays, in software development usually various models and description fragments are created. Some of these artifacts describe the core of the application, such as the data model or the user interaction model. Other artifacts describe cross-cutting concerns, such as security or the requirement: “every change of data has to be confirmed by the user, before it is written into the database”. During the development process these artifacts are combined, transformed, and finally implemented manually or even automatically. For instance a designer may combine a model of a dialog component specifying an action, that changes data, with a common description of a generic confirm dialog. The integrated dialog description may be afterwards implemented by a programmer. The manual combination of both artifacts and the transformation of the combined description into code are errorprone and hard to change. Industry basically tests or actually uses two approaches for the combination today: 1. At the level of code and execution Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is used [KLM+97]. An aspect defines a cross-cutting concern and the weaving instructions. A code weaver provides the actual weaving at compile or runtime. 2. At the level of design models and analysis models Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) i