Model-Driven Development of Distributed Ledger Applications

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is one of the most durable results of virtual currencies, which goes beyond the financial sector and impacts business applications in general. Developers can empower their solutions with DLT capabilities to attain such benefits as decentralization,  transparency,  non-repudiability of actions and security and immutability of data assets, to the price of integrating a distributed ledger framework into their software architecture. Model-Driven Development  (MDD) is the discipline that advocates the use of abstract models and of code generation to reduce the application development and integration effort by delegating repetitive coding to an automated model-to-code transformation engine. In this paper, we explore the suitability of MDD to support the development of hybrid applications that integrate centralized database and distributed ledger architectures and describe a prototypical tool capable of generating the implementation artefacts starting from a high-level model of the application and its architecture.