Modeling turnpike frontend system: a model-driven development framework leveraging UML metamodeling and attribute-oriented programming

This paper describes and empirically evaluates a new model-driven development framework, called Modeling Turnpike (or mTurnpike). It allows developers to model and program domain-specific concepts (ideas and mechanisms specific to a particular business or technology domain) and to transform them to the final (compilable) source code. By leveraging UML metamodeling and attribute-oriented programming, mTurnpike provides an abstraction to represent domain-specific concepts at the modeling and programming layers simultaneously. The mTurnpike frontend system transforms domain-specific concepts from the modeling layer to programming layer, and vise versa, in a seamless manner. Its backend system combines domain-specific models and programs, and transforms them to the final (compilable) source code. This paper focuses on the frontend system of mTurnpike, and describes its design, implementation and performance implications. In order to demonstrate how to exploit mTurnpike in application development, this paper also shows a development process using an example DSL (domain specific language) to specify service-oriented distributed systems.