A Framework for Near Real-Time Modeling and Generation of Community Applications

Communities use different online tools in their practice, with the purpose to improve the collaboration efficiency and the quality of the shared work outcomes. The software landscape in such an environment is usually heterogenous and tool development requires deep technical knowledge, as well as a good overview of the community tools and practice. In order to support developers (and also target end-users) in communities of practice in designing and prototyping tools, a widgetizing methodology was developed. The methodology specifies the process of reengineering existing single user Web applications into collaborative widget-based Web applications, but also main guidelines for developing widget-based Web applications. 

The current thesis aims to develop of a framework for modeling and generating community widget-based collaborative Web applications, based on the previous methodological findings and on state of the art architecture patterns. For the modeling tasks, the framework should build upon the SyncMeta meta-modeling framework, that was developed at i5 to allow the collaborative creation of metamodels and corresponding models in the Web browser.  

The student will perform a deep study of the existing literature on model-driven engineering and generative software development. The developed framework should support the modeling of Web applications, keeping into account the services (using REST/Microservice architecture principles), the interface (composed from multiple Web widgets) and the near real-time collaboration dimension.