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Building BESSER: An Open-Source Low-Code Platform

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Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2024, EMMSAD 2024)

Abstract

Low-code platforms (latest reincarnation of the long tradition of model-driven engineering approaches) have the potential of saving us countless hours of repetitive boilerplate coding tasks. However, as software systems grow in complexity, low-code platforms need to adapt as well. Notably, nowadays this implies adapting to the modeling and generation of smart software. At the same time, if we want to broaden the userbase of this type of tools, we should also be able to provide more open source alternatives that help potential users avoid vendor lock-ins and give them the freedom to explore low-code development approaches (even adapting the tool to better fit their needs). To fulfil these needs, we are building BESSER, an open source low-code platform for developing (smart) software. BESSER offers various forms (i.e., notations) for system and domain specification (e.g. UML for technical users and chatbots for business users) together with a number of generators. Both types of components can be extended and are open to contributions from the community.

This project is supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) PEARL program, grant agreement 16544475.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://plantuml.com/.

  2. 2.

    https://modeling-languages.com/image-to-uml-with-llm/.

  3. 3.

    https://palletsprojects.com/p/jinja/.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/BESSER-PEARL/BESSER-examples.git.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/BESSER-PEARL/BESSER-Bot-Framework.

  6. 6.

    https://climaborough.eu/.

  7. 7.

    https://eclipse.dev/modeling/emf/.

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Correspondence to Iván Alfonso .

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Alfonso, I. et al. (2024). Building BESSER: An Open-Source Low-Code Platform. In: van der Aa, H., Bork, D., Schmidt, R., Sturm, A. (eds) Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2024 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 511. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61007-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61007-3_16

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