Software product line for web-based geographic information systems

Abstract

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a research field that seeks to industrialize software development using techniques such as mass-production and mass-customization or reusing software components. A geographic information system (GIS) is an information system that works, in some way, with geographic information. Although each GIS is used in a particular area, there are many features common to all of them. In addition, strong standardization has been carried out so that most GIS software components are interoperable. Consequently, the application of SPLE in this domain is a feasible and interesting problem. Applying SPLE to a new domain is a complex process and, in order to guarantee the validity of the final design of the SPL and its evolution, it is important to strictly follow a methodology appropriate to the specific domain. Considering that it does not exist a suitable methodology for the context of our work (i.e., web-based GIS applications developed in a software company with several products in the market), we have decided to combine several existing methodologies and extend their scope with additional tasks that will are very useful in our context. After defining our SPL following this methodology, we found that the traditional techniques to implement SPL are not suitable for our domain, due to the peculiarities and requirements in the development of web-based GIS applications. Therefore, we have defined and implemented a new derivation engine for automatic software generation that maintains the formalities behind SPLE but at the same time provides a new degree of flexibility thanks to the use of a well-known industrial technique: scaffolding.