Product configuration of a software product line using a Domain Specific Language

A Software Product Line (SPL) reuses software assets to implement products that share a significant set of their features. When a developer needs to generate a new product, the selection of features determines which components and source code are assembled together as the product. In recent years, the Database Laboratory has been working with SPL tech- nologies in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Our SPL creates products from a specification that allows, in addition to defining the data model of the application, to customize specific elements of the application such as maps and their associated layers. However, during its use with real projects we detected that this customization was insuf- ficient: since the selected features are included for the whole product, if we need a feature only for a specific element, we need to apply it to all the elements of the same type. In this paper we propose a solution that, using a Domain Specific Language, allows to associate features with specific elements of the generated application in order to achieve a greater customization of the generated GIS and to improve their quality. This way, it is possible to select a feature (e.g., clustering) for a specific element (e.g., map-viewer), thus limiting the functionalities of the application to those parts where they are really necessary.