Dissag: a Software Development Environment for Distributed Information Systems

Distributed information systems (DISs) are increasing in usage rapidly. But the software development life cycle for DISs has changed very little. In such a cycle, a modeling tool is used in the analysis and design phase to help developers to build UML analysis and design models; and then in the implementation and testing phase, an IDE (Iterative Development Environment) is used for textual programming and program testing. The main problem with this cycle is the modeling cannot provide any direct help in the obtaining of the source code. Thus it is very inefficient. The feasible solution to thoroughly solve this problem consists three activities: 1) defining a new model that is based on the UML model but capable of supporting modeling DIS in more details for the purpose of generating code; 2) defining a feasible way to build such a model for a given DIS; 3) defining a code generation logic that can access the model and generate source code. DISSAG is the result of above activities. It is a component-based software development environment combining a modeling tool, a code generator and an IDE together seamlessly and, thus, supporting most DIS software development activities and automatically generating reasonably detailed source code based on the system specification. It has actually changed the traditional DIS software development cycle and enables its users to develop DIS software with an effective, efficient and reliable method. In this thesis we address all issues with the actual development life cycle of DISSAG.