Towards supporting SPL engineering in low-code platforms using a DSL approach

Low-code application platforms enable citizen developers to autonomously build complete applications, such as web applications or mobile applications. Some of these platforms also offer support for reuse to facilitate the development of similar applications. The offered mechanisms are usually elementary, they allow module reuse or building a new application from a template. However, they are insufficient to achieve the industrial level reuse necessary for software product lines (SPL). In fact, these platforms were conceived to help build standalone applications, not software families and even fewer software product lines. In this paper, we argue that the major limitation is that these platforms seldom provide access to their metamodel, the access to applications’ models and code is also limited and, therefore, makes it harder to analyze commonality and variability and construct models based on it. An approach is proposed to surpass these limitations: firstly, a metamodel of the applications built with the platform is obtained, and then, based on the metamodel, a domain-specific language (DSL) that can express the models of the applications, including variability, is constructed. With this DSL, users can combine and reuse models from different applications to explore and build similar applications. The solution is illustrated with an industrial case study. A discussion of the results is presented as well as its limitations and related work. The authors hope that this work provides inspiration and some ideas that the community can explore to facilitate the adoption and implementation of SPLs in the context, and supported by, low-code platforms.