Deadline for the assignment

Deadline for returning the course portfolio is Monday 20th May. See below for further instructions.

Assignment

For the course portfolio, your task is to implement a simple model-driven web-application design and development framework. With the framework, a web-application developer can design a web-application using a high-level textual modelling language. From the resulting model, a skeleton for the web-application implementation is generated automatically.

The framework includes the Web Application Description Language (WADL), its abstract and concrete syntaxes, and a transformation chain that generates a web-application implementation based on the Vaadin framework (http://vaadin.com). The abstract syntax is defined as a meta-model using the EMF Ecore. The textual concrete syntaxes are defined and implemented using the XText framework.

The transformation chain is implemented as a set of model-to-model and model-to-text transformations applicable and runnable using the Eclipse framework. Model-to-model transformations are implemented using the Operational QVT tool, and model-to-text transformations using the Acceleo tool.

Instructions for the meta-model

You should extend the WADL meta-model (provided under the project org.mde.wadl.metamodel in file model/wadl2.ecore) in such a way that each the Component element in the WADL meta-model corresponds to the AbstractComponent class in the Vaadin class hiearchy (see the figure below). That is, your meta-model should have a class hierarchy that corresponds to the Vaadin class hiearchy (e.g. Component has specializations such as Link or AbstractField).

The classes in your meta-model must faithfully represent the Vaadin classes with respect to their intrinsic (attribute) and extrinsic (reference) properties. For this, you must consult the Vaadin API and see what kinds of properties each class is associated with and represent those properties in your meta-model as well. You do not have to consider references outside the AbstractComponent class hiearchy. However, you might need to also consider some properties that are defined in the generalizations of the Vaadin AbstractComponent for your meta-model component hierarchy to be consistent. 

Instructions for the TCS implementation

The textual concrete syntax in the provided example projects comprise two grammars: a grammar for web-applications and a grammar for content descriptions. Now, it is your task to refactor these grammars (in projects org.mde.wadl.tcs and org.mde.content.tcs) in such a way, that the content description grammar represents faithfully the Vaadin AbstractComponent class hiearchy. That is, refactor the org.mde.content.tcs grammar in such a way that for example Buttons, DateFields or TabSheets can be described with your grammar. You must consult the Vaadin API documentation for the details about the properties each of these classes should have.

Now you should be able to describe contents of web-application pages in a way that aligns with the Vaadin component concepts. More over, the contents used in your web-applications are described in separate content description models that can be imported to web-application models (in the current version of the example grammar using the use construct).

Instructions for model-to-model transformations

You should create a model-to-model transformation that creates a model conforming with the WADL models from a model created with your the textual concrete syntax for web-application descriptions. A skeleton transformation is provided as part of the example projects (see the materials page).

Instructions for model-to-text transformations

You should create a model-to-text transformation that creates a Vaadin framework compliant Java-implementation (in most basic case, a single Java-file) of a web-application described by a WADL model. A skeleton transformation is provided as part of the example projects (see the materials page).

Portfolio contents and delivery instructions

The course portfolio includes all the software engineering artefacts and a short documentation you produce during the course. At minimum, the course portfolio must include the following elements:

1. The Web Application Description Language (WADL) meta-model. This is an Eclipse EMF project.
2. The concrete syntax implementation for WADL. This is an Eclipse XText project.
3. A model-to-model transformation from the XText generated meta-model that is based on the concrete syntax to your "pure" WADL meta-model. This is an Eclipse Operation QVT project.
4. A model-to-text transformation that produces Vaadin-specific Java code from a model conforming to the WADL meta-model.
5. A Vaadin project that serves as an output project for your M2T transformation.
6. A short documentation of the previous projects that describes what kind of design decisions you have made during implementation of the artefacts

All of the above Eclipse projects will be delivered by email to the lecturer (Toni.Ruokolainen(at)cs.Helsinki.FI). Use the Eclipse Framework's "Export"-functionality for producing zip-packages out of your projects. Also include the documentation in the email!