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Teaching model-driven engineering from a relational database perspective

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Abstract

We reinterpret MDE from the viewpoint of relational databases to provide an alternative way to understand, demonstrate, and teach MDE using concepts and technologies that should be familiar to undergraduates. We use (1) relational database schemas to express metamodels, (2) relational databases to express models, (3) Prolog to express constraints and M2M transformations, (4) Java tools to implement M2T and T2M transformations, and (5) Java to execute transformations. Application case studies and a user study illuminate the viability and benefits of our approach.

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Notes

  1. Specifically EMT, Graphical Modeling Tooling Framework Plug-in, OCL Tools Plug-in, and Eugenia for Eclipse 3.6.2.

  2. Admittedly, this statement holds for IDEs in general, and Eclipse in particular.

  3. Prolog tuples can have unquoted atoms (\(\mathtt{james}\)) and quoted atoms (‘\(\mathtt{James~Tiberius}\)’).

  4. The code for MDELite, including all of our T2M transformations, is free at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/schwartz/MDELite/index.html.

  5. The set of icons that one can drag and drop onto a canvas to create instances.

  6. Also known as megamodels [13] and tool chain diagrams [32].

  7. The only oddity of Fig. 14a is the domain \(\mathtt{SDBPL \times SDBPL}\), which is the cross-product of the SDBPL domain with itself. The merge arrow composes two SDBPL databases into a single SPBPL database (i.e., \(\mathtt{merge: SDBPL \times SDBPL \rightarrow SDBPL}\)).

  8. SDBPL tables classImplements, interfaceExtends, interface have no tuples. The Prolog declaration :- dynamic T/n. states that prolog tuples for table T with n attributes are empty.

  9. In some research, the term cohort is also used to refer to any group that is repeatedly measured over time, as in a longitudinal or panel study; however, this is a different use of the term [21, 35].

  10. Nine out of the 12 students chose to give their background information.

  11. Two documents \(\mathtt{d}_\mathtt{1}\) and \(\mathtt{d}_\mathtt{2}\) can differ in whitespace, ordering of declarations, etc. and still represent equivalent class diagrams.

  12. The undergraduate class is not MDE-specific, but is intended to cover and explain a wide spectrum of software development and design approaches.

  13. The Eclipse OCL tool plugin is similar in that one has to manually enter tuples beforehand before OCL queries can be executed. This is impractical, even for classroom settings.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the SoSyM referees for very constructive reviews of our initial draft; in a time where writing unconstructive, uninformed negative reviews has become a sport, these referees took their jobs seriously, for which we are grateful.

We are indebted to S. Trujillo (Ikerlan), O. Diaz (UPV/EHU), P. Stevens (Edinburgh), J. Siegmund (Passau) and L. Vozmediano (UPV/EHU) for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also appreciate the help given by M. Spönemann on the Kieler graph layout tools and R. Lämmel his invaluable help answering questions about Prolog. We also thank R. Berg, E. Huneke, A. Shali, and J. Ho for creating VM2T and thank J. Croy, D. Ilijev, B. Koo, E. Liu, T. McCandless, M. Parikh, C. Orchard, C. Salisbury, A. Sharp, J. Siu, C. Stewart, and M. Teng for participating in the user evaluation. We gratefully acknowledge support for this work by NSF grants CCF-1421211, CCF-0724979, and OCI-1148125, the Spanish Ministry of Education, and the European Social Fund under contract TIN2011-23839.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Don Batory

  2. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), San Sebastian, Spain

    Maider Azanza

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  1. Don Batory
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Correspondence to Don Batory.

Additional information

Communicated by Dr. Moreira and Dr. Schätz.

Appendices

Appendix 1: \(\mathbf{Families}_\mathtt{2}\mathbf{Persons}\) application

\(\mathbf{Families}_\mathtt{2}\mathbf{Persons}\) is a simple M2M application. A family database, consisting of two tables family and member, is transformed into a persons database, consisting of the male and female tables. Figure 18a, b shows the schema and tuples of the family and persons databases, respectively. The M2M rules in Prolog are given in Fig. 18c.

Fig. 18
figure 18

Families to Persons

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Appendix 2: An illustrative M2M example

Consider Fig. 19a shows an aggregation hierarchy: Each course has a number of offerings, and each offering has students and instructors. Using the rules of Sect. 2, the schema of b is produced from a. The primary or partial keys of each table are indicated in a by ‘Key’ and are underlined in b. To map this to a proper set of relational tables, where MDELite internal identifiers are absent and only primary or compound keys are present in tuples as in c, we need a M2M transformation.

The Prolog program that translates schema (b) to (c) is listed below:

figure h
Fig. 19
figure 19

Database normalization transformation

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Appendix 3: Illustrative VM2T application

The VM2T script that converts an FSM Prolog database into executable source is given below.

figure i

The Java code for class drink is shown below:

figure j

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Batory, D., Azanza, M. Teaching model-driven engineering from a relational database perspective. Softw Syst Model 16, 443–467 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-015-0488-7

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