Using Domain-Specific Languages, Patterns, Frameworks, and Tools to Assemble Applications

Abstract

Increasingly complex and rapidly changing requirements and technologies are making application development increasingly difficult. This tutorial explores this phenomenon, and presents the Software Factory pattern for building languages, patterns, frameworks and tools for specific domains, such as user interface construction or database design. We then explore innovations, such as adaptive assembly, software product lines and model driven development, which reduce the cost of implementing the pattern, making it cost effective for narrower and more specialized domains, such as B2C application development and business process automation. We introduce the concept of the software schema, a network of viewpoints describing artifacts comprising the members of a family of software products, and we show how mappings between these viewpoints can be used to provide constraints supporting model transformation and self organizing processes. Finally, we discuss the formation of software supply chains and show how the Software Factory pattern distributes across organizational boundaries.