Introducing a Change-Resistant Framework for the Development and Deployment of Evolving Applications

Abstract

Software development is an R&D intensive activity, dominated by human creativity and diseconomies of scale. Current efforts focus on design patterns, reusable components and forward-engineering mechanisms as the right next stage in cutting the Gordian knot of software. Model-driven development improves productivity by introducing formal models that can be understood by computers. Through these models the problems of portability, interoperability, maintenance, and documentation are also successfully addressed. However, the problem of evolving requirements, which is more prevalent within the context of business applications, additionally calls for efficient mechanisms that ensure consistency between models and code, and enable seamless and rapid accommodation of changes, without interrupting severely the operation of the deployed application. This paper introduces a framework that supports rapid development and deployment of evolving web-based applications, based on an integrated database schema. The proposed framework can be seen as an extension of the Model Driven Architecture targeting a specific family of applications.