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A Code-Efficient Process Scripting Language
Abstract
Business process management systems are an important piece of infrastructure for digital transformation initiatives. Rapid development of executable business processes is a key requirement in this context. Even though there are various process modeling languages available, none of them is designed with the ambition to be code efficient and expressive at the same time. In this paper, we investigated the research question how a process scripting language can be defined that addresses the four requirements of code efficiency, control flow expressiveness, data processing and event processing. To this end, we designed and implemented a process scripting language based on Kotlin. To analyze the language regarding the four requirements, we use the language in a case study of a real-world process of our industry partner.
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Context
During the last years, developers of mobile applications have the possibility to use new paradigms and tools for developing mobile applications. For instance, since 2017, Android developers have the official support to write Android applications using Kotlin language. Kotlin is programming language fully interoperable with Java that combines object-oriented and functional features.
Objective
The goal of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to study the degree of adoption of Kotlin language on the development of open-source Android applications and to measure the amount of Kotlin code inside those applications. Secondly, it aims to measure the quality of Android applications that are written using Kotlin and to compare it with the quality of Android applications written using Java.
Method
We first defined a method to detect Kotlin applications from a dataset of open-source Android applications. Then, we analyzed those applications to detect instances of code smells and computed an estimation of the quality of the applications. Finally, we studied how the introduction of Kotlin code impacts on the quality of an Android application.
Results
Our experiment found that 11.26% of applications from a dataset with 2,167 open-source applications have been written (partially or fully) using Kotlin language. We found that the introduction of Kotlin code increases the quality, in terms of the presence of 10 different code smells studied, 4 object-oriented and 6 Android, of the majority of the Android applications initially written in Java.
This extended abstract summarizes an article, which has been published in the Empirical Software Engineering Journal and was selected for the Journal-First presentations at the International Conference on Software and System Process (ICSSP 2018).
Full Article Reference. Oscar Dieste, Alejandrina M. Aranda, Fernando Uyaguari, Burak Turhan, Ayse Tosun, Davide Fucci, Markku Oivo, and Natalia Juristo. Empirical evaluation of the effects of experience on code quality and programmer productivity: an exploratory study. Empirical Software Engineering 22, 5 (01 Oct 2017), 2457--2542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9471-3
The microservice architecture is a style inspired by service-oriented computing that has recently started gaining popularity and that promises to change the way in which software is perceived, conceived and designed. In this paper, we describe the main features of microservices and highlight how these features improve scalability.
Microservices is an architectural style inspired by service-oriented computing that has recently started gaining popularity. Before presenting the current state-of-the-art in the field, this chapter reviews the history of software architecture, the reasons that led to the diffusion of objects and services first, and microservices later. Finally, open problems and future challenges are introduced. This survey primarily addresses newcomers to the discipline, while offering an academic viewpoint on the topic. In addition, we investigate some practical issues and point out some potential solutions.
Microservices is an architectural style inspired by service-oriented computing that has recently started gaining popularity. Before presenting the current state-of-the-art in the field, this chapter reviews the history of software architecture, the reasons that led to the diffusion of objects and services first, and microservices later. Finally, open problems and future challenges are introduced. This survey primarily addresses newcomers to the discipline, while offering an academic viewpoint on the topic. In addition, we investigate some practical issues and point out some potential solutions.
Domain-Specific Languages are used in software engineering in order to enhance quality, flexibility, and timely delivery of software systems, by taking advantage of specific properties of a particular application domain. This survey covers terminology, risks and benefits, examples, design methodologies, and implementation techniques of domain-specific languages as used for the construction and maintenance of software systems. Moreover, it covers an annotated selection of 75 key publications in the area of domain-specific languages. 1998 ACM Computing Classification System: D.3 Keywords and Phrases: Example DSLs, DSL design, DSL implementation, survey. Note: Work carried out under project SEN 1.5, Domain-Specific Languages, sponsored by the Telematica Instituut. 1 Introduction In all branches of science and engineering one can distinguish between approaches that are generic and those that are specific. A generic approach provides a general solution for many problems in a certain ar...
The WS-BPEL 2.0 specification [WS-BPEL 2.0] provides a language for formally
Many domain-specific languages, that try to bring feasible alternatives for existing solutions while simplifying programming work, have come up in recent years. Although, these little languages seem to be easy to use, there is an open issue whether they bring advantages in comparison to the application libraries, which are the most commonly used implementation approach. In this work, we present an experiment, which was carried out to compare such a domain-specific language with a comparable application library. The experiment was conducted with 36 programmers, who have answered a questionnaire on both implementation approaches. The questionnaire is more than 100 pages long. For a domain-specific language and the application library, the same problem domain has been used – construction of graphical user interfaces. In terms of a domain-specific language, XAML has been used and C# Forms for the application library. A cognitive dimension framework has been used for a comparison between XAML and C# Forms.
Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.
Abstract. Although workflow management emerged as a research area well over a decade ago, little consensus has been reached as to what
should be essential ingredients of a workflow specification language. As a result, the market is flooded with workflow management
systems, based on different paradigms and using a large variety of concepts. The goal of this paper is to establish a formal
foundation for control-flow aspects of workflow specification languages, that assists in understanding fundamental properties
of such languages, in particular their expressive power. Workflow languages can be fully characterized in terms of the evaluation
strategy they use, the concepts they support, and the syntactic restrictions they impose. A number of results pertaining to
this classification will be proven. This should not only aid those developing workflow specifications in practice, but also
those developing new workflow engines.
An alignment of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) promises
seamless integration of process documentation and executable process definitions. Thus, a lot of research has been conducted
on a mapping from BPMN to BPEL. The other perspective of this alignment, i.e. a BPEL-to-BPMN mapping, was largely neglected.
This paper presents a condensed discussion of such a mapping and its pitfalls. We illustrate why such a mapping is not as
straight-forward as commonly assumed and discuss the gaps to be bridged towards a better alignment of both languages.
CLOUD COMPUTING, the long-held dream of computing as a utility, has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry, making software even more attractive as a service and shaping the way IT hardware is designed and purchased. Developers with innovative ideas for new Internet services no longer require the large capital outlays in hardware to deploy their service or the human expense to operate it. They need not be concerned about overprovisioning for a service whose popularity does not meet their predictions, thus wasting costly resources, or underprovisioning for one that becomes wildly popular, thus missing potential customers and revenue. Moreover, companies with large batch-oriented tasks can get results as quickly as their programs can scale, since using 1,000 servers for one hour costs no more than using one server for 1,000.
Grammar metrics have been introduced to measure the quality and the complexity of the formal grammars. The aim of this paper is to explore the meaning of these notions and to experiment, on several grammars of domain specific languages and of general-purpose languages, existing grammar metrics together with the new metrics that are based on grammar LR automaton and on the language recognized. We discuss the results of this experiment and focus on the comparison between grammars of domain specific languages as well as of general-purpose languages and on the evolution of the metrics between several versions of the same language.
Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are computer (programming, modeling, specification) languages devoted to solving problems in a specific domain. The development of a DSL includes the following phases: decision, analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. The least-known and least examined are analysis and design. Although various formal methodologies exist, domain analysis is still done informally most of the time. A common reason why formal methodologies are not used as often as they could be is that they are very demanding. Instead of developing a new, less complex methodology, we propose that domain analysis could be replaced with a previously existing analysis in another form. A particularly suitable form is the use of ontologies. This paper focuses on ontology-based domain analysis and how it can be incorporated into the DSL design phase. We will present the preliminary results of the Ontology2DSL framework, which can be used to help transform ontology to a DSL grammar incorporating concepts from a domain.
Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are languages tailored to a specific
application domain. They offer substantial gains in expressiveness
and ease of use compared with general-purpose programming languages
in their domain of application. DSL development is hard, requiring
both domain knowledge and language development expertise. Few people
have both. Not surprisingly, the decision to develop a DSL is often
postponed indefinitely, if considered at all, and most DSLs never
get beyond the application library stage.Although many articles have
been written on the development of particular DSLs, there is very
limited literature on DSL development methodologies and many questions
remain regarding when and how to develop a DSL. To aid the DSL developer,
we identify patterns in the decision, analysis, design, and implementation
phases of DSL development. Our patterns improve and extend earlier
work on DSL design patterns. We also discuss domain analysis tools
and language development systems that may help to speed up DSL development.
Finally, we present a number of open problems.
In this paper we examine the suitability of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for business process modelling, using the Workflow Patterns as an evaluation framework. The Workflow Patterns are a collection of patterns developed for assessing control-flow, data and resource capabilities in the area of Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs). In doing so, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of BPMN, and its strengths and weaknesses when utilised for business process modelling. The analysis provided for BPMN is part of a larger effort aiming at an unbiased and vendor-independent survey of the suitability and the expressive power of some mainstream process modelling languages. It is a sequel to previous work in which languages including BPEL and UML Activity Diagrams were evaluated.
Often heated, debates regarding different programming languages'
effectiveness remain inconclusive because of scarce data and a lack of
direct comparisons. The author addresses that challenge, comparatively
analyzing 80 implementations of the phone-code program in seven
different languages (C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx and Tcl). Further,
for each language, the author analyzes several separate implementations
by different programmers. The comparison investigates several aspects of
each language, including program length, programming effort, runtime
efficiency, memory consumption, and reliability. The author uses
comparisons to present insight into program language performance
A comprehensive guide to well-known workflow patterns: recurrent, generic business process constructs, described from the control-flow, data, and resource perspectives.
The study of business processes has emerged as a highly effective approach to coordinating an organization's complex service- and knowledge-based activities. The growing field of business process management (BPM) focuses on methods and tools for designing, enacting, and analyzing business processes. This volume offers a definitive guide to the use of patterns, which synthesize the wide range of approaches to modeling business processes. It provides a unique and comprehensive introduction to the well-known workflow patterns collection—recurrent, generic constructs describing common business process modeling and execution scenarios, presented in the form of problem-solution dialectics. The underlying principles of the patterns approach ensure that they are independent of any specific enabling technology, representational formalism, or modeling approach, and thus broadly applicable across the business process modeling and business process technology domains.
The authors, drawing on extensive research done by the Workflow Patterns Initiative, offer a detailed introduction to the fundamentals of business process modeling and management; describe three major pattern catalogs, presented from control-flow, data, and resource perspectives; and survey related BPM patterns. The book, a companion to the authoritative Workflow Patterns website, will be an essential resource for both academics and practitioners working in business process modeling and business process management.
In the previous chapters, we learned how to use qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques in order to identify issues of existing business processes. We also saw that many processes in practice have problems with flow-time efficiency. Various redesign heuristics emphasize the potential of using information systems to improve process performance. This chapter deals with information systems that support process automation. First, we briefly explain what an automated business process is, after which we focus on two types of systems that are particularly suitable to achieve process automation, i.e., Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) and Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs). We will present the different variants of these systems and explain their features. Finally, we will discuss some of the advantages and challenges that are involved with introducing a BPMS in an organization.
In this chapter, application of grammatical inference to facilitate development of domain-specific languages (DSLs) is presented. Grammatical inference techniques have been applied to infer DSL grammar from DSL programs. Such a scenario would be feasible when domain experts can provide complete DSL programs or excerpts of such programs. The results of grammatical inference, namely the inferred grammar, can be directly used to generate the DSL parser or be further examined by a software language engineer with the aim to further enhance the design of the language. To achieve this goal we developed a memetic algorithm which enables incremental grammar inference. It is a population based evolutionary algorithm enhanced with local search and a generalization phase. Some examples of DSLs from which grammars have been successfully inferred from positive samples are presented.
With the significant advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) over the last half century, there is an increasingly perceived vision that computing will one day be the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, and telephony). This computing utility, like all other four existing utilities, will provide the basic level of computing service that is considered essential to meet the everyday needs of the general community. To deliver this vision, a number of computing paradigms have been proposed, of which the latest one is known as Cloud computing. Hence, in this paper, we define Cloud computing and provide the architecture for creating Clouds with market-oriented resource allocation by leveraging technologies such as Virtual Machines (VMs). We also provide insights on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation. In addition, we reveal our early thoughts on interconnecting Clouds for dynamically creating global Cloud exchanges and markets. Then, we present some representative Cloud platforms, especially those developed in industries, along with our current work towards realizing market-oriented resource allocation of Clouds as realized in Aneka enterprise Cloud technology. Furthermore, we highlight the difference between High Performance Computing (HPC) workload and Internet-based services workload. We also describe a meta-negotiation infrastructure to establish global Cloud exchanges and markets, and illustrate a case study of harnessing ‘Storage Clouds’ for high performance content delivery. Finally, we conclude with the need for convergence of competing IT paradigms to deliver our 21st century vision.
One approach to measuring and managing the complexity of software, as it evolves over time, is to exploit software metrics. Metrics have been used to estimate the complexity of the maintenance effort, to facilitate change impact analysis, and as an indicator for automatic detection of a transformation that can improve the quality of a system. However, there has been little effort directed at applying software metrics to the maintenance of grammar-based software applications, such as compilers, editors, program comprehension tools and embedded systems. In this paper, we adapt the software metrics that are commonly used to measure program complexity and apply them to the measurement of the complexity of grammar-based software applications. Since the behaviour of a grammar-based application is typically choreographed by the grammar rules, the measure of complexity that our metrics provide can guide maintainers in locating problematic areas in grammar-based applications. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
