Development of Digital Libraries with Software Product Line Engineering

Digital Libraries have become popular nowadays since important libraries all over the world started distributing their collections online, properly classified, and, in many cases, with access to the digital version of the resource. These programs have been beneficial to the general population as well as research groups in fields such as language and literature. Nonetheless, since their creation is a time-consuming and costly process, small organizations are forced to rely on obsolete or poorly designed software. However, most of the features, including the data model, are shared by this type of system, with minor variations depending on the type of resources to be handled. This article presents a Software Product Line (SPL) for the semi-automatic generation of Digital Libraries (DL). Our SPL allows developers to specify which DL features are required, which will define the data model variation and the generated source code. The specification is then transformed into a fully functional DL application with the specified features that is ready for deployment. We present the feature model, the SPL implementation, and a case study on three sample projects that enabled us to evaluate the resulting software, with a focus on development effort savings.