Simplicity first model based plug in development
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. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.
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