A Model-Driven Architectural Framework for Integration-Capable Enterprise Application Product Lines

Enterprise business applications are critical to the smooth operation of modern businesses and need to quickly respond to changing business rules, processes and technologies. Also, the ever-increasing thrust on collaboration calls for these applications to smoothly integrate with each other. MDA enables an application to be specified in terms of platform independent models each addressing a concern of interest and then transforming them into a platform-specific implementation. Traditional organization of an enterprise, as a set of functionally distinct departments, results in a set of isolated applications providing point solutions each constructed for a specific purpose with context-specific built-in assumptions implicit in their specifications. These assumptions lead to conflicts or mismatches during integration calling for application integration to be addressed as an explicitly modeled concern. Typically, a business application needs to be specialized for the requirements of a specific enterprise. Product line architectures that organize systems into well-defined core and variable parts have been proposed to address this need. However, traditional code based development approaches lack suitable abstractions to support product lines. We propose a model driven architectural framework that enables a system to be specified in terms of composable units, along the required dimensions of variation, wherein the integration requirements are modeled explicitly. Component interface is augmented with data models, process models, constraints, assertions and pre/post-conditions. A set of properties that need to be satisfied for semantically correct integration are proposed along with a set of verification techniques. We propose a software factory that seamlessly addresses development and integration needs of enterprise product lines and describe our experience in building and using it.