Marco Brambilla

This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development, as demonstrated by various quantitative and qualitative studies. MDSE adoption in the software industry is foreseen to grow exponentially in the near future, e.g., due to the convergence of software development and business analysis. The aim of this book is to provide you with an agile and flexible tool to introduce you to the MDSE world, thus allowing you to quickly understand its basic principles and techniques and to choose the right set of MDSE instruments for your needs so that you can start to benefit from MDSE right away. The book is organized into two main parts. The first part discusses the foundations of MDSE in terms of basic concepts (i.e., models and transformations), driving principles, application scenarios, and current standards, like the well-known MDA initiative proposed by OMG (Object Management Group) as well as the practices on how to integrate MDSE in existing development processes.The second part deals with the technical aspects of MDSE, spanning from the basics on when and how to build a domain-specific modeling language, to the description of Model-to-Text and Model-to-Model transformations, and the tools that support the management of MDSE projects. The second edition of the book features: a set of completely new topics, including: full example of the creation of a new modeling language (IFML), discussion of modeling issues and approaches in specific domains, like business process modeling, user interaction modeling, and enterprise architecturecomplete revision of examples, figures, and text, for improving readability, understandability, and coherencebetter formulation of definitions, dependencies between concepts and ideasaddition of a complete index of book content In addition to the contents of the book, more resources are provided on the book's website http://www.mdse-book.com, including the examples presented in the book.

This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE).MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development, as demonstrated by various quantitative and qualitative studies. MDSE adoption in the software industry is foreseen to grow exponentially in the near future, e.g., due to the convergence of software development and business analysis.The aim of this book is to provide you with an agile and flexible tool to introduce you to the MDSE world, thus allowing you to quickly understand its basic principles and techniques and to choose the right set of MDSE instruments for your needs so that you can start to benefit from MDSE right away.The book is organized into two main parts.The first part discusses the foundations of MDSE in terms of basic concepts (i.e., models and transformations), driving principles, application scenarios, and current standards, like the well-known MDA initiative proposed by OMG (Object Management Group) as well as the practices on how to integrate MDSE in existing development processes.The second part deals with the technical aspects of MDSE, spanning from the basics on when and how to build a domain-specific modeling language, to the description of Model-to-Text and Model-to-Model transformations, and the tools that support the management of MDSE projects.The second edition of the book features:a set of completely new topics, including: full example of the creation of a new modeling language (IFML), discussion of modeling issues and approaches in specific domains, like business process modeling, user interaction modeling, and enterprise architecturecomplete revision of examples, figures, and text, for improving readability, understandability, and coherencebetter formulation of definitions, dependencies between concepts and ideasaddition of a complete index of book contentIn addition to the contents of the book, more resources are provided on the book's website http://www.mdse-book.com, including the examples presented in the book.

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search.The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.

Interaction Flow Modeling Language describes how to apply model-driven techniques to the problem of designing the front end of software applications, i.e., the user interaction. The book introduces the reader to the novel OMG standard Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). Authors Marco Brambilla and Piero Fraternali are authors of the IFML standard and wrote this book to explain the main concepts of the language. They effectively illustrate how IFML can be applied in practice to the specification and implementation of complex web and mobile applications, featuring rich interactive interfaces, both browser based and native, client side components and widgets, and connections to data sources, business logic components and services. Interaction Flow Modeling Language provides you with unique insight into the benefits of engineering web and mobile applications with an agile model driven approach. Concepts are explained through intuitive examples, drawn from real-world applications. The authors accompany you in the voyage from visual specifications of requirements to design and code production. The book distills more than twenty years of practice and provides a mix of methodological principles and concrete and immediately applicable techniques.

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search.The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.

The most prominent Web applications in use today are data-intensive. Scores of database management systems across the Internet access and maintain large amounts of structured data for e-commerce, on-line trading, banking, digital libraries, and other high-volume sites. Developing and maintaining these data-intensive applications is an especially complex, multi-disciplinary activity, requiring all the tools and techniques that software engineering can provide. This book represents a breakthrough for Web application developers. Using hundreds of illustrations and an elegant intuitive modeling language, the authors—all internationally-known database researchers—present a methodology that fully exploits the conceptual modeling approach of software engineering, from idea to application. Readers will learn not only how to harness the design technologies of relational databases for use on the Web, but also how to transform their conceptual designs of data-intensive Web applications into effective software components.

The book deals with the propagation and absorption of high frequency waves in plasmas (hot, fully ionized gases). Research in this field is very active in controlled fusion research, i.e. the quest for energy from nuclear reactions similar to those going on within the sun, and in astrophysics, i.e. the study of space plasmas in the earth ionosphere, stars, and galaxies. The text collects in a structured and self-contained way the basic knowledge on the broad and varied behaviour of plasma waves, adopting the microscopic kinetic description of the plasma as unifying principle. The internal coherence of the theory is explicity stressed, and very interesting physical phenomena peculiar to plasmas, such as collisionless damping of waves, the development of stochasticity in the interactions of charged particles with electromagnetic waves, and nonlinear interactions between waves, are discussed in detail. The most common and useful approximations used in solving practical problems are derived as special cases from the more general kinetic approach, thereby clarifying their meaning and domain of applicability. This exposition should be useful to plasma physicists both as an introduction and a reference to this field of research. Because of its multi-disciplinary aspects it might also be of interest to people specializing in kinetic theory, classical electromagnetism, or classical mechanics, as a nontrivial example of application of the methods of these fields to the unconventional plasma medium.