A Model-driven Approach to Flexible Multi-Level Customization of SaaS Applications

Recently, Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a popular software service mode. Context-awareness and customizability are important and desirable properties for providing the same application for different customers. Most of existing approaches tackle application customization by explicitly specifying some form of variation points where parts of the application remain unspecified or are defaulted and can be customized by each customer to suit its particular needs. This, however, leads to a mismatch between how the architect or developer logically views and interprets differences in a SaaS application family and the actual modeling constructs through which the logical differences must be expressed. Hence, in order to capture the variability in SaaS applications in a more logical and independent way we propose the concept of change fragment and change primitives. A novel approach to effective customization of SaaS at levels of control flow and component framework is proposed and evaluated. Keywords-context-awareness; SaaS; MDD; SaaS customization