PYDOP: A Generic Python Library for Delta-Oriented Programming

Delta-Oriented Programming (DOP) is a modular and flexible approach to implement Software Product Lines (SPLs). In DOP, an SPL is structured in four parts: the feature model describes the configuration space of the SPL; the base artifact is an initial artifact; the deltas are sequences of transformation operations on an artifact; and the configuration knowledge indicates for which configuration and in which order the deltas are applied on the base artifact to generate the variant corresponding to the input configuration. In principle, DOP can thus be used to construct SPLs over any artifact that can be transformed. In this paper, we introduce the pydop library which implements DOP in python3. This library provides all the necessary structures to build SPLs over any transformable python artifact. Moreover, it provides transformation operations over python classes and modules, thus enabling the possibility to build SPLs over python code as well. Finally, this library also provides a simple Multi-SPL mechanism that enable SPL interactions.