Concern-oriented interfaces for model-based reuse of APIs

Reuse is essential in modern software engineering, but limited in the context of MDE by the poor availability of reusable models. On the other hand, reusable code artifacts such as frameworks and libraries are abundant. This paper presents an approach to raise reusable code artifacts to the modelling level by modelling their API using concern-oriented techniques, thus enabling their use in the context of MDE. Our API interface models contain additional information, such as the encapsulated features and their impacts, to assist the developer in the reuse process. Once he has specified his needs, the model interface exposes only the API elements relevant for this specific reuse at the model level, together with the required usage protocol. We show how this approach is applied by hand to model the interface of a small GUI framework and outline how we envision this process to be performed semi-automatically.