Design profiles : Toward unified tool support for design patterns and UML profiles

In the current trend of software engineering, patterns and profiles lend themselves as two powerful complementary mechanisms for documenting and enforcing design rules. In this paper, we study how unified tool support can be achieved for patterns and profiles by interpreting them as role-based structural descriptions and exploiting existing tool support for role modeling. The approach is realized using so-called design profiles, which allow both validation and generation of models according to rules expressed in the patterns and profiles. A prototypical tool environment supporting the approach has been developed. The practical applicability of the approach is demonstrated by specifying design rules of the enterprise Java beans (EJB) platform and by producing an environment for designing EJB-based applications. We also discuss possible usage scenarios in the context of this case study. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.