Modelibra Education

Modelibra is a domain model framework for rapid application development. A domain model may be designed, generated, and validated as a web application. Modelibra uses the Wicket web framework for generic web components that are views of model concepts. The generic web components may be mixed with specific web components to develop a professional Wicket application.

In computer terms, a domain model is a model of specific domain classes that describe the core data and their behavior. From an organizational perspective, a domain model is a model of the domain. Within this domain, an organization conducts its business. The memory of any organization may be represented as a domain model.

The heart of any software is a domain model. When a model is well designed and when it can be easily represented and managed in an object oriented language, a developer may focus on views of the software and they are what users care about the most.

The Modelibra open source software is hosted by JavaForge. Consult Steps to get Modelibra.

For a quick introduction to Modelibra watch a short (19 minutes; 9MB) demo video.

For a quick overview of Modelibra consult the paper entitled Modelibra Software Family at the CISSE 2007 Conference, or the paper presentation.

Forum

To discuss Modelibra issues or to ask questions use its Forum.

Educational Spirals

A development process is a crucial subject in software engineering. In this learning project, the spiral approach to software development, which preserves the project history as a series of code snapshots, is used to help developers learn new concepts and technologies. For each spiral, there is a complete web application and a document explaining the spiral. The web application is about different categories of web links that are of interest to certain members. Categories, web links, members, member interests and comments are concepts of the application domain model.

Learning new software concepts and technologies is a challenging task. Learning in spirals, from simple to more advanced concepts but with a concrete software application, helps less experienced developers get a reasonable confidence level early on. With each new spiral, the project grows and new concepts are introduced. A new spiral is explained with respect to the previous one. This is called learning by anchoring to what we already understand. With a new spiral, we can come back to what we did previously and improve it. In this way, learning in spirals can touch the same topic several times, but each time with more details in a better version.

Modelibra Education is based on those spirals. The Java code for spirals is located at JavaForge in the Modelibra project under the DmEduc name.