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Maintaining Vaadin Legacy Applications using DSLs based on Xtext

Authors:
Marcel Toussaint
Thomas Baar

Keywords: Software design; Metamodelling; Data models; Software maintenance; Graphical user interfaces; Database systems

Abstract:
Vaadin, as a framework for the development of web applications, enables programmers to develop web applications purely in Java. The Vaadin framework has a clean architecture and enjoys a vibrant community. The popularity of Vaadin is certainly also due to numerous tutorials and small examples that illustrate certain aspects of the framework. Vaadin applications, once they became more complex than the appealing tutorials, might run - as well as many other software projects - into maintenance problems. In this paper, we report on a database application, whose programmers followed the suggestions from the tutorials rather strictly. Over time, it became harder and harder to accommodate changes of the database structure since the Java code made certain assumptions on the structure of database tables at many different locations. The classical approach to handle such a situation would be to refactor the entire Java code, which can be very costly. An alternative approach is to use a domain-specific language (DSL) to (a) capture those parts of the application that might vary in future in form of a language, (b) to create a model using this language that reflects the current application, and (c) to change the model due to new requirements and to regenerate those parts of the application that need to be adapted. The last step (c) automates the work of a human software maintainer who would adapt the application code manually due to new requirements (e.g., a new database structure). In this paper, we report on our initial experience when implementing the DSLbased approach using the framework Xtext.

Pages: 518 to 521

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: October 12, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 12, 2014 to October 16, 2014