Don Batory

This text is about compositional programming, where programs are constructed by composing prewritten software building blocks. Three modern compositional paradigms are covered, listed in order of decreasing emphasis: A Software Product Line is a design for a family of programs. Each program is composed from predefined increments of program functionality. The Linux Kernel is the largest known product line whose family size exceeds 102000 distinct programs. Model Driven Engineering is a general-purpose engineering methodology to support system design, analysis, construction, and evolution. Software designs are expressed as models. Transformations are composed to convert models into other models for analysis, to produce documentation and/or source. Streaming Applications are dataflow graphs whose nodes (called boxes) are computations with input and output data streams; boxes are wired/composed together to produce a custom program (aka software circuit). Examples are Unix pipe-and-filters and distributed stream processing. The book is aimed at both practitioners and advanced students, assuming some familiarity with programming in Java. It draws on the author's unique personal insights from over four decades of experience as an academic at a leading research university as well as a hands-on developer of software tools. Written in an engaging style, the text highlights important contributions toward principled software engineering and composable designs made by researchers in diverse areas such as formal methods, programming languages, software system development, testing and deployment, databases, and networks. Parts of the book can be read and enjoyed as a historical narrative, while others can be studied more deeply to reflect on open research challenges and opportunities. In a world where AI and machine learning offer seductive yet untapped opportunities to generate software automatically, this book is a reminder of how and why the mathematical foundations of software construction still matter.

This text is about compositional programming, where programs are constructed by composing prewritten software building blocks. Three modern compositional paradigms are covered, listed in order of decreasing emphasis: A Software Product Line is a design for a family of programs. Each program is composed from predefined increments of program functionality. The Linux Kernel is the largest known product line whose family size exceeds 102000 distinct programs. Model Driven Engineering is a general-purpose engineering methodology to support system design, analysis, construction, and evolution. Software designs are expressed as models. Transformations are composed to convert models into other models for analysis, to produce documentation and/or source. Streaming Applications are dataflow graphs whose nodes (called boxes) are computations with input and output data streams; boxes are wired/composed together to produce a custom program (aka software circuit). Examples are Unix pipe-and-filters and distributed stream processing. The book is aimed at both practitioners and advanced students, assuming some familiarity with programming in Java. It draws on the author's unique personal insights from over four decades of experience as an academic at a leading research university as well as a hands-on developer of software tools. Written in an engaging style, the text highlights important contributions toward principled software engineering and composable designs made by researchers in diverse areas such as formal methods, programming languages, software system development, testing and deployment, databases, and networks. Parts of the book can be read and enjoyed as a historical narrative, while others can be studied more deeply to reflect on open research challenges and opportunities. In a world where AI and machine learning offer seductive yet untapped opportunities to generate software automatically, this book is a reminder of how and why the mathematical foundations of software construction still matter.

This upper-division undergraduate text explains major paradigms that automate software development. Presentations integrate 50+ years of results in software design, relational databases, using category theory (a simple and profound theory about structures and transformations) as a foundation. Among the paradigms covered include: Model Driven Engineering, Refactoring MDE Metamodels, Refactoring Java Programs, Design Patterns, Software Product Lines, Dataflow by Transformation, Category Theory Edition #2 is a major rewrite of Edition #1, with new material, corrections, and revisions.

While standardization has empowered the software industry to substantially scale software development and to provide affordable software to a broad market, it often does not address smaller market segments, nor the needs and wishes of individual customers. Software product lines reconcile mass production and standardization with mass customization in software engineering. Ideally, based on a set of reusable parts, a software manufacturer can generate a software product based on the requirements of its customer. The concept of features is central to achieving this level of automation, because features bridge the gap between the requirements the customer has and the functionality a product provides. Thus features are a central concept in all phases of product-line development. The authors take a developer’s viewpoint, focus on the development, maintenance, and implementation of product-line variability, and especially concentrate on automated product derivation based on a user’s feature selection. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides a general introduction to feature-oriented software product lines, describing the product-line approach and introducing the product-line development process with its two elements of domain and application engineering. The pivotal part II covers a wide variety of implementation techniques including design patterns, frameworks, components, feature-oriented programming, and aspect-oriented programming, as well as tool-based approaches including preprocessors, build systems, version-control systems, and virtual separation of concerns. Finally, part III is devoted to advanced topics related to feature-oriented product lines like refactoring, feature interaction, and analysis tools specific to product lines. In addition, an appendix listsvarious helpful tools for software product-line development, along with a description of how they relate to the topics covered in this book. To tie the book together, the authors use two running examples that are well documented in the product-line literature: data management for embedded systems, and variations of graph data structures. They start every chapter by explicitly stating the respective learning goals and finish it with a set of exercises; additional teaching material is also available online. All these features make the book ideally suited for teaching – both for academic classes and for professionals interested in self-study.

While standardization has empowered the software industry to substantially scale software development and to provide affordable software to a broad market, it often does not address smaller market segments, nor the needs and wishes of individual customers. Software product lines reconcile mass production and standardization with mass customization in software engineering. Ideally, based on a set of reusable parts, a software manufacturer can generate a software product based on the requirements of its customer. The concept of features is central to achieving this level of automation, because features bridge the gap between the requirements the customer has and the functionality a product provides. Thus features are a central concept in all phases of product-line development. The authors take a developer’s viewpoint, focus on the development, maintenance, and implementation of product-line variability, and especially concentrate on automated product derivation based on a user’s feature selection. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides a general introduction to feature-oriented software product lines, describing the product-line approach and introducing the product-line development process with its two elements of domain and application engineering. The pivotal part II covers a wide variety of implementation techniques including design patterns, frameworks, components, feature-oriented programming, and aspect-oriented programming, as well as tool-based approaches including preprocessors, build systems, version-control systems, and virtual separation of concerns. Finally, part III is devoted to advanced topics related to feature-oriented product lines like refactoring, feature interaction, and analysis tools specific to product lines. In addition, an appendix listsvarious helpful tools for software product-line development, along with a description of how they relate to the topics covered in this book. To tie the book together, the authors use two running examples that are well documented in the product-line literature: data management for embedded systems, and variations of graph data structures. They start every chapter by explicitly stating the respective learning goals and finish it with a set of exercises; additional teaching material is also available online. All these features make the book ideally suited for teaching – both for academic classes and for professionals interested in self-study.