A homogeneous repository for collaborative MDE

Abstract

The Model Driven Development (MDD) paradigm is gaining acceptance due to its ability to raise the level of abstraction and automation in the construction of software. However, current tools lack of some capabilities that are essential for MDD collaborative work such as version control. Because of this, large-sized projects that need teamwork development are hard to tackle. A software repository is a key component in an infrastructure that supports collaborative work; it provides version control and other advanced features such as distributed development. Several model repository tools are currently available but they are mainly focused in providing model persistence. Several approaches for supporting version control have been proposed but they exhibit some significant limitations as they have been designed to support model management, giving poor or no support for metamodel development. We propose a repository that is capable of uniformly managing metamodels and models through all their development processes. Incremental and collaborative development of (meta)models is supported using a version control system that allows developers to examine the changes applied to the (meta)models. We have devised an architecture to register changes between versions that is an alternative to the traditional delta-based scheme in order to improve performance. Such architecture is explained from the database, driver and version control perspectives.