TY  - JOUR
A1  - Naujokat, Stefan
A1  - Neubauer, Johannes
A1  - Lamprecht, Anna-Lena
A1  - Steffen, Bernhard
A1  - Joerges, Sven
A1  - Margaria, Tiziana
T1  - Simplicity-first model-based plug-in development
JF  - Software : practice & experience
N2  - In this article, we present our experience with over a decade of strict simplicity orientation in the development and evolution of plug-ins. The point of our approach is to enable our graphical modeling framework jABC to capture plug-in development in a domain-specific setting. The typically quite tedious and technical plug-in development is shifted this way from a programming task to the modeling level, where it can be mastered also by application experts without programming expertise. We show how the classical plug-in development profits from a systematic domain-specific API design and how the level of abstraction achieved this way can be further enhanced by defining adequate building blocks for high-level plug-in modeling. As the resulting plug-in models can be compiled and deployed automatically, our approach decomposes plug-in development into three phases where only the realization phase requires plug-in-specific effort. By using our modeling framework jABC, this effort boils down to graphical, tool-supported process modeling. Furthermore, we support the automatic completion of process sketches for executability. All this will be illustrated along the most recent plug-in-based evolution of the jABC framework, which witnessed quite some bootstrapping effects.
KW  - plug-ins
KW  - simplicity
KW  - domain-specific APIs
KW  - process modeling
KW  - bootstrapping
KW  - evolution
KW  - code generation
KW  - loose programming
KW  - dynamic service binding
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2243
SN  - 0038-0644
SN  - 1097-024X
VL  - 44
IS  - 3
SP  - 277
EP  - 297
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -