Clowiz: A Model-driven Development Platform for Cloud-based Information Systems

Cloud-based solution of software systems development is currently the preferred approach over traditional on-premise one. In fact, utilizing cloud computing can reduce cost, time to market and allows for potential growth and scalability. However, this approach requires special quality attributes (i.e. non-functional requirements) to be taken into consideration. These attributes include traceability, recoverability, portability, and hot-deployability, along with the more common attributes of usability, reliability, efficiency, availability and security. Consequently, this increases the complexity of design and implementation of such applications. Therefore, such systems have a higher-cost and longer development time than traditional applications. In this paper, Clowiz is proposed. In particular, it is a cloud-based platform enabling rapid application development for building high-quality information systems applications. It is based on a model-driven development approach. In this approach, software developers shall use a web-based modeling toolkit to develop Internet based information systems, and modify them on the fly. The development process includes building application’s views map (i.e. workflow), design systems entities (e.g. tables), and develop user interface forms. The platform enables application preview and deployment. In addition, it enables monitoring applications behavior at run time. The work presented in this paper contains a full waterfall software engineering process with full standard deliverables based on the UML modeling language, starting from requirements, and continuing to design and architecture, development, testing, and evolution.