A Tool and an Approach for the Automatic Generation of Digital

Networks

Francesco Pilotti, Giorgio Campea, Daniela D’Alessandro, Daniele Di Valerio

and Gaetanino Paolone

Gruppo SI S.c.a.r.l., 64100 Teramo, Italy

Keywords: Automatic Code Generation, Digital Network, Model Driven Engineering, Small- and Medium-sized

Enterprises (SMEs), Technological Platform.

Abstract: Today, Web and Mobile applications play an important role in any Information System (IS). Small- and

Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) need these applications to digitalise themselves and be competitive in a

globalised world. However, developing Web applications is a challenging goal. Model Driven Engineering

(MDE) is a well-known process for the development of software systems. To sidestep the pitfalls concerning

the adoption of MDE in the industry, and to provide SMEs with easy-to-use tools to enter the global market,

the paper presents DNetGenerator, a tool which performs the automatic code generation of Web portals in C#

code. The Web portals are part of a previous study, aimed at developing Technological platforms for SMEs,

in order for them to create and manage a digital network. DNetGenerator allows the deployment of the Web

portals on the cloud. The paper presents the process for using the tool as well. With DNetGenerator, SMEs

will be able to design, generate and deploy their Web portals, according to their requirements and without any

programming skills.

1 INTRODUCTION

Today, Web and Mobile applications play an

important role in any Information System (IS). These

applications perform many business functions (e.g.,

order processing, customer relationship management,

e-commerce of goods and/or services, etc.). This is

true both for large enterprises and Small- and

Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) willing to

implement the digital transformation of their

businesses. Since Web and Mobile applications are a

relevant component of an IS, nowadays ISs have

strong digital features and can be defined digital ISs.

The main goal of these systems is to improve

productivity and efficiency performing the

aforementioned business functions. In this context, a

Web portal is a portal which performs (some of) these

functions. Any organization, SMEs above all, needs

these tools to digitalise itself and be competitive in a

globalised world.

The backbone of the economy of most countries

is composed of SMEs. As pointed out very clearly in

the literature, digitalisation has a positive effect on

market performance of enterprises and helps the

growth of their businesses. It also sets the conditions

for SMEs competitiveness in the global market. In

light of the literature review conducted in (Pilotti et

al., 2021), in order to survive in the global market

SMEs must ally themselves with other SMEs

operating in the same market segment, and offer an

amazing shopping experience to their customers. The

pillar of the proposal in (Pilotti et al., 2021) is the

notion of digital network, i.e., “a network of

collaborating SMEs physically distributed over a

territory, which share the objective of selling goods

and/or services to potential consumers through a

digital platform”. Web and Mobile applications are

relevant components of a digital network.

Developing Web applications is a challenging

goal (Agustin and del Barco, 2013). For an IT project

to be successful, it must reproduce, as much as

possible, the business context, in such a way all the

stakeholders can recognize in the software their daily

modus operandi: each “actor” plays a set of “use

cases” within an organization, regardless of

automation. Similarly, for an e-commerce Web

application to be efficient, it must reproduce the same

purchasing process of the SME commissioning it.

Pilotti, F., Campea, G., D’Alessandro, D., Di Valerio, D. and Paolone, G.

A Tool and an Approach for the Automatic Generation of Digital Networks.

DOI: 10.5220/0011138700003266

In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2022), pages 121-128

ISBN: 978-989-758-588-3; ISSN: 2184-2833

121

The Use Case (UC) construct (Booch et al., 1999)

is particularly relevant since it exists in the business

context independently from the automation process.

(Paolone et al., 2008) proposed a methodology that

helps reproducing UCs and objects of the business

domain into enterprise Web applications. In that

work, the UCs were treated as the main pillar for the

Web application development, since they are the

central concept of the business model: every SME

owner and/or manager knows the UCs of their SME,

as well as the interactions among them. (Paolone et

al., 2010) and (Paolone et al., 2011) reshaped the

point of view in (Paolone et al., 2008) in a novel use-

case-driven methodology, within the general frame of

reference of the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA).

MDA enables model-driven software development

which treats models as primary development

artefacts. Model-Driven Development (MDD),

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), Model-Driven

Software Development (MDSD), and MD* are terms

used for referring to the existing approaches to

model-driven development (Jörges, 2013). (Paolone

et al., 2020) mentioned the pitfalls concerning the

adoption of MDE in the industry. To sidestep these

pitfalls, and to provide SMEs with easy-to-use tools

to enter the global market, we developed

DNetGenerator, a tool which performs the automatic

code generation of the SMEs and Customers portals

(the Web portals). The Web portals are part of the

Technological platform proposed in (Pilotti et al.,

2021). The tool also allows the deployment of the

Web portals on the cloud. Using DNetGenerator, any

SME will be able to design, generate and deploy their

Web Portals according to their requirements and

without any programming skills.

The present paper is part of an ongoing industrial

research project. The frame of reference is MDA, but

the pillars of the proposal are, besides the UCs,

stereotypes and portal style. Stereotypes allow the

implementation of structurally equal portal models;

portal style defines the look and feel of each Portal.

Both Portals automatically generated by

DNetGenerator are essential part of the digital IS of

each SME adhering to a digital network. We are

aware that the topics addressed in the paper are many,

and it is out of the scope of this paper to detail them

all. The core concepts and notions briefly recalled in

Section 2 aim to give a sketch of the general

background that motivates and permeates the project.

The remaining part of the paper is structured as

follows. Section 2 summarizes the Background of the

paper. Section 3 contains an overview of

DNetGenerator and the Technological platform

development approach (i.e., the steps required to

design, generate and deploy Web portals); it also

illustrates the current development state of the tool.

Section 4 is about the related work, while Section 5

concludes the paper with a look to the future work.

2 BACKGROUND

This Section collects notions and concepts relevant

for our project.

2.1 Technological and Methodological

Foundations

Regarding the technological and methodological

foundations of the project, we make explicit reference

to the Background in (Paolone et al. 2020). The

software development process used for the creation of

DNetGenerator is, in fact, an instantiation of the

proposal described in (Paolone et al. 2020), the only

difference being that the generated source code is C#

instead of Java. The foundations of the project are:

Unified Modeling Language (UML) as modeling

language (OMG, 2017); Rational Unified Process

(RUP) and MDA as methodological paradigms; the

model-driven transformation; cloud computing as

baseline technology; finally, automatic code

generation.

UML stereotypes are relevant elements for the

project. They are language extensions for creating

new kinds of building blocks derived from the

existing ones, to be used in a specific business domain

(Booch et al. 1999). Stereotypes are effective model

elements to implement model-driven transformation.

They provide details expressive enough for

representing a business domain into an application.

RUP is the best-known refinement of the Unified

Process (UP). It is an iterative and incremental

process for the development of general purpose

software (Kruchten, 2003). The disciplines of RUP

are: 1. Business Modeling, 2. Requirements, 3.

Analysis and Design, 4. Implementation, 5. Test, 6.

Deployment, 7. Configuration and Change

Management, 8. Project Management, and 9.

Environment.

2.2 Portal Style

Regarding the Web portal style, relevant notions for

the paper are related to Web design and usability

(ISO, 2018). The look and feel of a Web portal

concerns both visual aspects (layout, colors, shapes,

etc.) and the user’s modality of interaction. It can

provide many benefits in terms of user experience. An

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effective Web portal enables a highly customizable

and engaging experience, meeting user’s needs and

expectations. User Experience Design (Norman,

1999) and User Interface Design (Galitz, 2007) are

the most common and effective approaches to embed

usability principles into a Web application.

2.3 Alliances and Digital Networks

The current competitive scenario is globalised.

SMEs’ competitiveness is limited in such a setting,

due to two primary factors: (a) limited access to

resources and (b) local presence of multinational

enterprises (Masroor and Asim, 2019). A systematic

review about the current technological challenges and

SMEs performance in the global market is (Prasanna

et al., 2019). In (Ensari and Karabay, 2014), SMEs’

flexibility and capacity to efficiently react to business

changes is underlined, while their dimension emerges

as a major limitation. The lack of adequate

management and technical skills within SMEs is one

of the main challenges and barriers to their digital

transformation (Rupeika-Apoga et al., 2022).

SMEs alliances and networks are a recurring and

articulate topic in research concerning relationships

among firms. An incomplete list of contributions is

the following: (Varadarajan and Cunningham, 1995;

Gulati, 1998; Naeem et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2019;

Agostini and Nosella, 2019; Hilmersson and

Hilmersson, 2021). The concept of alliance is firmly

embedded into that of digital network; in particular,

the classification in (Varadarajan and Cunningham,

1995), concerning horizontal and vertical alliances,

was adopted in (Pilotti et al., 2021) in defining the

digital network and its Technological platform.

3 THE DNETGENERATOR TOOL

An IS is the “technological image” of a business

system. SMEs willing to join together in order to

build a digital network create a new business system,

which is composed of the business system of each

adhering SME, and new information from the digital

network. DNetGenerator aims to build an IS for

creating a technological image of the digital network

business system. DNetGenerator automatically

generates the Web portals of the Technological

platform conceptual model in (Pilotti et al., 2021).

This Section provides an overview of

DNetGenerator, and the Technological platform

development approach. A Subsection is devoted to

showing the details of the tool. The software

development approach adopted for the development

of DNetGenerator is the same used in (Paolone et al.,

2020).

It is important to keep in mind that the

development of Web portals is actually part of the

development of ISs. Therefore, automatic Web portal

generation can be supported by code generators

designed for ISs development. However, the IS of a

digital network is a new system, not just an extension

of each adhering SME IS: this is the peculiarity of our

proposal. DNetGenerator can be considered a tool for

developing ISs, with a distinctive feature: the

generated Technological platform perfectly adheres

to the digital network business system.

3.1 Overview of DNetGenerator

DNetGenerator is developed in C# and deployed on a

cloud environment (it is an aPaaS). The cloud is also

the deployment environment of the generated Web

Portals. Using the cloud as generation and

deployment environment potentially ensures the

alignment between business and IT for the SMEs

adhering to the digital network. Business-IT

alignment is one of the main focuses in research

concerning firms organizational and technological

issues (Njanka et al., 2021; Canhoto et al., 2021).

The availability of a tool such as DNetGenerator

constitutes a tangible help for the SMEs because, by

implementing the automatic code generation, it

reduces the level of IT skills that SMEs must have to

equip themselves for global competition and establish

alliances through a digital platform. The tool quickly

and easily generates and deploys the Web portals of

the digital network: in so doing it helps sidestepping

the obstacles concerning skills, resources and

commitment that SMEs usually face in implementing

digital platforms (Cenamor et al., 2019).

We assume an arbitrary number of SMEs willing

to found a digital network. The following definitions

(DN stands for digital network) are used within our

overall research project:

 DN Founder: the SME founding the digital

network;

 Adhering SME: a SME joining the digital

network;

 DN Manager: the actor of the DN Founder;

 SME Manager: the actor of an Adhering SME;

 DN Customer: any Web user interested in

products and/or services of a digital network.

The users of DNetGenerator are the actors of the

system. From the user’s perspective, the process for

using DNetGenerator is the following: a) the DN

Founder requests to the DNetGenerator Admin to

A Tool and an Approach for the Automatic Generation of Digital Networks

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create a digital network within the tool; b) the Admin

registers the digital network and enables a DN

Manager to create new projects; c) the DN Manager

uploads the business information of the DN Founder;

d) the DN Manager can choose whether to add a new

project or a new company (Adhering SME); e) the

DN Manager can choose: one among many possible

stereotypes to design the structure of the Web portals,

the portal style elements of choice, and the Internet

domains; f) the SME Manager uploads the business

information of the Adhering SME; g) the DN

Manager generates the Technological platform (Web

portals and DB); h) the DN Customer uses the Web

portals.

At a high level of abstraction, DNetGenerator is a

black box that receives as input a digital network

conceptual model and returns the C# code of the Web

portals.

3.2 Technological Platform

Development Approach

The Section illustrates the process for creating the

Technological platform of a digital network using

DNetGenerator.

With the economy in a critical phase,

organizations are resetting their goals. To realize

these goals, projects are striving for lower costs and

higher productivity. On the one hand these goals

might be reached by outsourcing, on the other hand

standardization, industrialization and reuse could also

contribute. A long-term promise in the field of

increasing productivity and reuse is to handcraft less

code, and generate it from the project's design or

model. Reaching this goal has been the one of the

main motivations that guided us (and still does) in

developing DNetGenerator. The availability of this

tool is particularly relevant for SMEs and their need

for affordable and easy-to-use software solutions.

DNetGenerator enables a model driven approach

to develop projects. The preliminary phase concerns

the definition of the digital network business model

(computation-independent). This model contains the

actors, the Business Use Case Realizations (BUCRs)

and the business objects. The phase is in charge of the

DN Manager. Afterwards, the approach for building

a Technological platform can be expressed in a small

number of steps:

1. Derive the digital network conceptual model

from the digital network business model. The

DN Manager must define structural and

behavioral features of the Web portals.

2. Link the digital network conceptual model to

the DNetGenerator stereotypes. A growing

collection of 5 standard types to generate the

digital networks is available, making life easier

when it comes to requirements analysis, project

creation, testing, and code generation.

3. Decorate the digital network conceptual model.

To be able to generate code, the BUCRs are

combined with the elements from the domain

model and the fitting stereotypes. The BUCRs

are associated with the Use Case Realization

(UCR) stereotypes.

4. Select the logical model in DNetGenerator. A

stereotype in DNetGenerator can be applied to

any digital network in order to generate a

Technological platform. The UCRs of

DNetGenerator are to be used by the DN

Manager to configurate names, Internet

domains, images, etc., of the Web Portals.

5. Generate code. The generation is based on a

cloud reference architecture. The logical model

is transformed in a physical model (C# and

DB).

DNetGenerator links the digital network

conceptual model to the coding of the structural and

behavioral aspects. The process described above can

be used by a domain expert with no technological

background. This was a major requirement of the

tool, that has oriented and guided its development. In

order to meet this requirement, we adopted a RUP-

compliant software development approach, which is

also in accordance with (Paolone et al., 2008; Paolone

et al., 2010). According to the RUP disciplines, the

DNetGenerator development process is summarized

below. After defining the DNetGenerator idea, a

transition happened from the business idea to the

project idea. Requirements was about defining the

requirements of the tool in order to fulfill the needs of

the DN Manager: he/she has only business

knowledge. Such an activity produced the BUCRs

mentioned in Section 3.3. Analysis & Design

performed the trace operation of the BUCRs into

UCRs, producing the latter. Some of the UCRs are

shown in Section 3.3. Implementation was carried out

to create all the scenarios of all the designed UCRs.

The Test of the tool is currently in progress.

DNetGenerator has been deployed in a testing

environment. The same environment is used to

deploy and test the generated projects.

3.3 DNetGenerator at Present

The Section describes the current development state

of DNetGenerator.

The BUCRs are the following:

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 Company Archive: the BUCR allows the

request and registration of the digital networks

in order for them to use DNetGenerator.

 Project Archive: the BUCR allows the creation

of projects related to a company (SME).

 DN Generator: the BUCR allows the automatic

generation of the Web portals defined within a

company project.

 DN Deployment: the BUCR allows the

deployment of the generated Web portals on

the cloud.

Some of the UCRs related to the above mentioned

BUCRs are presented below, with screenshots taken

from DNetGenerator. To achieve a high usability of

DNetGenerator, the UIs are visually simple and easy-

to-use: the user has only to select options, press

buttons, and insert the information in the required

fields. The Home Page is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: DNetGenerator Home Page.

The UCR Company traces the BUCR Company

Archive and is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The UCR Company.

The UCR Project traces the BUCR Project Archive

and is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The UCR Project.

Generate is the last UCR described in this paper. It

starts by clicking on the “Generate” button as shown

in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The UCR Generate.

The first scenario of the UCR is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: The UCR Generate first scenario.

The generation process is starting at this point (Figure

6): the Web portals and the DB are being generated.

A Tool and an Approach for the Automatic Generation of Digital Networks

125

Figure 6: The starting of the generation process.

4 RELATED WORK

To our knowledge, there aren’t tools aimed at

automatically generating Technological platforms for

digital networked SMEs. Hence, the related work of

the paper concerns both proposals of code generators

in the IS domain, and proposals based on different

technologies and paradigms which equip SMEs with

digital platforms or methods in order to implement

digital networking.

This Section starts with an overview about

methods and tools for code generation in MDE and

MDA domains, with particular reference to Web

portal development proposals. Then it turns to a set of

heterogeneous proposals concerning methods,

models, and tools technologically and conceptually

different from DNetGenerator, but aiming at the same

purpose of our tool, i.e., building and supporting

digital networks in order for SMEs to be competitive

in the global scenario.

4.1 Model-Driven Code Generation

Currently, there are many software development tools

enabling model-driven code generation. The

contribution in (Kahani et al., 2019) provides an up-

to-date state of the art about model transformation

tool and techniques. As of today, generating 100%

source code is not possible yet. Nonetheless, many

empirical studies show that adopting MDE allows for

partial code generation.

For example, (Parada et al., 2011) propose an

MDE approach to automate code generation that

takes into account UML 2.x class and sequence

diagrams for embedded systems. This approach

generates code (through a tool called GenCode,

whose input is the XMI of the UML model) up to the

level of method invocations, while variable

assignments or math operations cannot be generated.

Regarding UI design based on stereotypes, (da

Costa et al., 2014a) proposed a UI stereotype to build

Web portals. This stereotype enables the automatic

generation of Web Portal UI components. The

authors adopted a model driven development

approach, namely the Model-Based UI (MBUI)

approach proposed by the same authors in (da Costa

et al., 2014b). An MDA compliant reference

framework establishes the foundation of MBUI. It

decomposes UI development in four steps,

corresponding to the MDA levels. In (da Costa et al.

2014a), three metamodels are used to specify

essential characteristics for the interaction design

through a high-level UI description. The proposed

generation approach complies with the Interaction

Flow Modeling Language (IFML), an OMG standard.

Both (da Costa et al., 2014a) and our proposal rely on

model driven development aiming at automatic code

generation, but the first approach is limited to UI

generation, whereas DNetGenerator automatically

generates the full executable code of Web portals.

4.2 Tools and Methods for

Implementing Digital Platforms

There are many contributions in the literature

concerning methods and tools to enable or enhance

the digital transformation of SMEs within networks

and alliances, and to further their competitiveness in

a global scenario. These contributions are

heterogeneous and multidisciplinary. A few of them

are listed below.

(Hönigsberg and Dinter, 2019) present a specific

method which provides a guidance for digital

transformation of SME networks, regarding value co-

creation (VCC) in particular. The evaluation of the

method was carried out with both an artificial

evaluation and a case study - a network composed of

4 SMEs in the textile industry. The proposal is built

upon 6 requirements drawn from seminal literature

and a meeting with the 4 SMEs. From these

requirements, the authors derive a process model for

implementing the digital transformation in SME

networks, then embed it in a larger context taking into

account procedure, general conditions, and forms of

the method. Finally, 3 viewpoints (a. strategy process,

b. digital transformation, c. value co-creation in

networks) are considered. The method is composed

of 6 process steps, within the formulation and

implementation phases. Differently from

DNetGenerator, this proposal does not define a

specific technological framework, as authors,

according to the first elicited requirement, state that

“The method has to be goal-oriented and strategy

focused”.

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(Aulkemeier et al., 2019) propose an architecture

for an inter-organizational platform to facilitate

collaboration among partners, in particular by

enabling them to build quick connect and disconnect

relationship. The authors present a state of the art of

collaboration architectures, to assess the predominant

inter-organizational IT architectures. In order to

improve the quick connect capability of organizations

within a business network, they defined the

requirements and the platform architecture, following

two different design science research methodologies.

Then, they created a prototype - for the online retail

sector - of the collaboration platform and evaluated it

by implementing services. The conclusion of the

authors is that the platform approach increases

flexibility in business-to-business collaboration. The

proposal in (Aulkemeier et al., 2019) shares our very

goal to enable platform-based collaboration for

organizations, and it is focused on allowing flexible

relationships among them; however, it is not aimed at

enabling the same kind of digital network that our

proposal does. In fact, DNetGenerator generates and

deploys, in its final version, a Technological platform

specifically designed for implementing vertical and

horizontal alliances among SMEs.

(Penha-Lopes et al., 2020) identified the current

problems affecting the traditional software

development, and presented GENerate Input Output

(Genio), a platform which adopts an MDE approach

for code generation, supported by patterns (i.e.,

repeating code lines). Each Genio pattern includes the

corresponding generation process: through inference,

it translates the model into source code. There are

four models to be created in Genio. Genio also

manages, maintains, and controls manual

components of the code (i.e., not corresponding to a

pattern). The modeling doesn’t require technological

skills, only a good business knowledge: this is a

common feature with our proposal.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

This paper describes DNetGenerator, a tool that

automatically generates the Web portals of the

Technological platform of a digital network, as

described in (Pilotti et al., 2021). It is an instantiation

of the software development process described in

(Paolone et al., 2020).

DNetGenerator is able to generate 100% of the

source code of the Web portals, and deploy them on

the cloud ready to be used. This is an important

achievement of the ongoing industrial research

project. The Web portals are the first components of

the Technological platform which can be generated

by the tool. Implementing the automatic generation of

the add-ons of the Technological platform conceptual

model (customer satisfaction component, Mobile

apps) will be part of the future work.

As of today, DNetGenerator is a working

prototype; it is an early example built to test the

concept and the process related to digital networks.

Further refinements are needed to improve its

capability, as well as case studies to validate it.

Other future research directions concern the

refinement of the stereotypes and the elements of

portal style to be implemented in DNetGenerator.

Moreover, the definition of new stereotypes and

elements will be useful in order to provide a wider

range of choices to SMEs, for example, for digital

networks operating in specific domains.

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