MDSD for Portals

Portals are subject to high demands: They should be the anchor point for all business processes and facilitate the company with contact to its customers, partners and employees. The integration of the operational processes may not be limited by either the use of various systems or by participation of multiple departments or companies. Another requirement is the merging of all service and operational processes under a single user interface – and thus preventing common failures often resulting from the exchange of applications.

The implementation of complex portal projects however in reality proves to be a great challenge. Especially  predominantly manual development processes do not always lead to the desired benefits.

Challenges at a glance

• High professional and technical complexity
• Constantly changing requirements and framing conditions
• Time-consuming and costly manual development
• Late detection of errors
• Costly adjustments, bug fixes and maintenance
• Limited expert knowledge

With small steps to success

With model driven portals, itemis AG applies agile and extensively automated processes. The focus of the approach are models that reduce the complexity of the task by deliberately omitting details for a more compact overview.

The idealized straightforward progression of the problem to the portal solution is not usually possible because the framework conditions and requirements change constantly. Because of this, itemis produces rapidly executable and testable portal-applications in small consecutive steps that can subsequently be refined and enhanced – until the desired, final portal-result is achieved.

Each step includes specification, implementation and testing. This iterative approach to the model driven development of portals allows all participating departments and companies constant control over the progress of projects.

Especially with very complex requirements, the advantages of model driven portal development are clear: By using the formal and specifically aligned modeling languages of itemis for the development of portals, the so-called DSL, the specification becomes optimized. Technical errors and inconsistencies in the process are thereby discovered at an early stage.

This model driven development of portals also considers from the beginning that complex requirements and constraints change frequently and at short notice. The incremental approach allows for making changes and corrections with very little effort. Thereby, the use of models brings with itself the easy traceability of requirements right up to actual programming code.

How does Model Driven Portal Development work?

In the model driven development of portals user interfaces, gateways, processes and business objects are modeled with graphical and textual DSL's. These models are iteratively refined and enhanced by technical aspects. The disadvantages of an informal, error-prone prose-specification do not occur with this approach.

The complex parts of the technology are furthermore encapsulated in a generator. The generator maps the models in an automated way to the target platform, the portal-server. Through the mapping specifications, a uniform and easy to maintain architecture develops.

The implementation of model driven portals in comparison to conventional manual procedures is associated with considerably lower staff costs. By the use of the automated approach, only a few experts like software architects and generator specialists are required.

Get to know MDSD for Portals

itemis offers a Beginners-Workshop for model driven portals: This gives you the opportunity to test the benefits of »MDSD for Portals« in practice. The itemis experts identify on the basis of a clear cost-benefit-analysis in conjunction with your development department the application possibilities for model driven portals in your company.