Afternoon Master Class, Thursday November 2, 2006
Model-driven Development of Component-based Systems in Cadena
John Hatcliff (Kansas State University)

The use of component models such as Enterprise Java Beans and the
CORBA Component Model (CCM) in application development is expanding
rapidly.  Even in real-time safety/mission-critical domains,
component-based development is beginning to take hold as a mechanism
for incorporating non-functional aspects such as real-time,
quality-of-service, and distribution.  To form an effective basis for
development of such systems in large-scale industrial contexts, we
believe that a variety of modeling and analysis capabilities will be
required including meta-modeling facilities for describing
product-line architectures, light-weight formal specifications,
behavioral and dependence analysis, and code generation facilities.

This lecture will present an overview of Cadena -- a sophisticated
integrated development environment for building and modeling
large-scale component-based systems of systems using widely-used
component models such as EJB, CCM, and domain-specific component
frameworks.  The talk will focus on Cadena's multi-level type-based
meta-modeling framework for capturing component-based product-line
architectures and various notions of architectural refinement.  In
this framework, type signatures define contracts for Cadena plug-in
points at which different analysis, visualization, and code
generation capabilities can be plugged into Cadena to customize
the tool environment to particular development scenarios.  The
architectural refinement relations give rise to a rational framework
for plug-in re-use across all architectures whose type signature conforms
to the architecture at which the plug-in was originally defined.

Cadena is implemented within IBM's Eclipse IDE, and it has been
used by research engineers at Boeing, Lockheed Martin,
and Rockwell Collins to demonstrate the effectiveness of model-driven
component-based product-line development for avionics and
command-and-control systems.