Iteration: MIDAS-CASE - Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Abstract
During the last 20 years, there has been a continuous tendency towards
raising the level of abstraction at which software is designed and developed. This
way, assembly languages gave way to structured programming that yielded to
object-orientation and so on. The last step in this line has been the Model-Driven
Engineering (MDE) paradigm,that promotes the use of models as primary actors
in the software development.
The underlying idea is to capture the system requirements and specification
in high-level abstraction models that are automatically refined into low-level
abstraction models. The latter takes into account the details of the targetting
platforms and could be shown as the plans for the working-code. Indeed, such
models are directly serialized into the working-code that implements the system.
This way, automation comes as the other key of MDE: there is a need of tools for
defining models, connecting them by means of model transformations, serializing
them into code, etc.
During the last years, the impact of the MDE paradigm has resulted in the
advent of a number of methodological proposals for Model-Driven Software
Development (MDSD). According to the MDE principles, the authors of such
proposals have developed the corresponding tools that should provide with the
technical support for them. However, the absence of standards and their closed
nature have resulted in tools providing with ad-hoc solutions that do not make the
most of IDM‘s advantages in the form of less costly, rapid software development.
In this context, this thesis addresses the specification of M2DAT (MIDAS
MDA Tool), a framework for semi-automatic model-driven development of Web
Information Systems. To that end, instead of developing the technical support for
each task comprised in a MDSD proposal, M2DAT integrates the isolated
functionality provided by a set of existing tools for MDE tasks that will be used as
building blocks.
This way, as part of this thesis we will define a conceptual architecture for
MDSD frameworks. It will be an extensible, modular and dynamic architecture
that promotes the integration of new capabilities in the form of new modules or
subsystems and supports introducing desing decisions to drive the embedded
model transformations. As well, since the proposed environtment follows a
modular architecture, the development process to follow in order to build and
integrate new modules will be defined.
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