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146
On the Unification Power of Models
"... In November 2000, the OMG made public the MDA ™ initiative, a particular variant of a new global trend called MDE (Model Driven Engineering). The basic ideas of MDA are germane to many other approaches such as generative programming, domain specific languages, model-integrated computing, generic mo ..."
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Cited by 189 (7 self)
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In November 2000, the OMG made public the MDA ™ initiative, a particular variant of a new global trend called MDE (Model Driven Engineering). The basic ideas of MDA are germane to many other approaches such as generative programming, domain specific languages, model-integrated computing, generic model management, software factories, etc. MDA may be defined as the realization of MDE principles around a set of OMG standards like MOF, XMI, OCL, UML, CWM, SPEM, etc. MDE is presently making several promises about the potential benefits that could be reaped from a move from codecentric to model-based practices. When we observe these claims, we may wonder when they may be satisfied: on the short, medium or long term or even never perhaps for some of them. This paper tries to propose a vision of the development of MDE based on some lessons learnt in the past 30 years in the development of object technology. The main message is that a basic principle ("Everything is an object") was most helpful in driving the technology in the direction of simplicity, generality and power of integration. Similarly in MDE, the basic principle that "Everything is a model" has many interesting properties, among others the capacity to generate a realistic research agenda. We postulate here that two core relations (representation and conformance) are associated to this principle, as inheritance and instantiation were associated to the object unification principle in the class-based languages of the 80's. We suggest that this may be most useful in understanding many questions about MDE in general and the MDA approach in particular. We provide some illustrative examples. The personal position taken in this paper would be useful if it could generate a critical debate on the research directions in MDE.
MontiCore: a framework for compositional development of domain specific languages
, 2010
"... Domain specific languages (DSLs) are increasingly used today. Coping with complex language definitions, evolving them in a structured way, and ensuring their error freeness are the main challenges of DSL design and implementation. The use of modular language definitions and composition operators ar ..."
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Cited by 49 (38 self)
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Domain specific languages (DSLs) are increasingly used today. Coping with complex language definitions, evolving them in a structured way, and ensuring their error freeness are the main challenges of DSL design and implementation. The use of modular language definitions and composition operators are therefore inevitable in the independent development of language components. In this article, we discuss these arising issues by describing a framework for the compositional development of textual DSLs and their supporting tools. We use a redundance-free definition of a readable concrete syntax and a comprehensible abstract syntax as both representations significantly overlap in their structure. For enhancing the usability of the abstract syntax, we added concepts like associations and inheritance to a grammarbased definition in order to build up arbitrary graphs (as known from metamodeling). Two modularity concepts, grammar inheritance and embedding, are discussed. They permit compositional language definition and thus simplify the extension of languages based on already existing ones. We demonstrate that compositional engineering of new languages is a useful concept when project-individual DSLs with appropriate tool support are defined.
COPE -- Automating Coupled Evolution of Metamodels and Models
"... Model-based development promises to increase productivity by offering modeling languages tailored to a specific domain. Such modeling languages are typically defined by a metamodel. In response to changing requirements and technological progress, the domains and thus the metamodels are subject to ..."
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Cited by 49 (11 self)
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Model-based development promises to increase productivity by offering modeling languages tailored to a specific domain. Such modeling languages are typically defined by a metamodel. In response to changing requirements and technological progress, the domains and thus the metamodels are subject to change. Manually migrating existing models to a new version of their metamodel is tedious and error-prone. Hence, adequate tool support is required to support the maintenance of modeling languages. This paper introduces COPE, an integrated approach to specify the coupled evolution of metamodels and models to reduce migration effort. With COPE, a language is evolved by incrementally composing modular coupled transformations that adapt the metamodel and specify the corresponding model migrations. This modular approach allows to combine the reuse of recurring transformations with the expressiveness to cater for complex transformations. We demonstrate the applicability of COPE in practice by modeling the coupled evolution of two existing modeling languages.
Bridging grammarware and modelware
- Proc. of Satellite Events at the MoDELS 2005 Conference, Montego
, 2005
"... Abstract. In Software Engineering many text-based languages and supporting tools are used, forming the grammarware technical space. Currently model driven engineering is the new emerging paradigm for software engineering, which uses modelling languages and tools, forming the modelware technical spac ..."
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Cited by 45 (5 self)
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Abstract. In Software Engineering many text-based languages and supporting tools are used, forming the grammarware technical space. Currently model driven engineering is the new emerging paradigm for software engineering, which uses modelling languages and tools, forming the modelware technical space. Transition to the new technical space and interoperability between these two technical spaces is needed in many development scenarios. Building a bridge between these two technical spaces is a tedious task, that has to be repeated for each language to be transformed. Therefore, we propose a generic bridge between grammarware and modelware technical spaces, that can generate a specific bridge based on the EBNF of a given language semi-automatically. The generation comprises of two steps, (1) automatic generation of metamodel corresponding to the EBNF and (2) annotations to provide the additional semantics not captured by the EBNF. The generated bridge is capable of bi-directional transformations between sentences (programs)
Towards a Megamodel to Model Software Evolution through Transformations
- SETRA Workshop, Elsevier ENCTS
, 2004
"... Model Driven Engineering is a promizing approach that could lead to the emergence of a new paradigm for software evolution, namely Model Driven Software Evolution. Models, Metamodels and Transformations are the cornerstones of this approach. Combining these concepts leads to very complex structures ..."
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Cited by 36 (3 self)
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Model Driven Engineering is a promizing approach that could lead to the emergence of a new paradigm for software evolution, namely Model Driven Software Evolution. Models, Metamodels and Transformations are the cornerstones of this approach. Combining these concepts leads to very complex structures which revealed to be very di#cult to understand especially when di#erent technological spaces are considered such as XMLWare (the technology based on XML), Grammarware and BNF, Modelware and UML, Dataware and SQL, etc. The concepts of model, metamodel and transformation are usually ill-defined in industrial standards like the MDA or XML. This paper provides a conceptual framework, called a megamodel, that aims at modelling large-scale software evolution processes. Such processes are modeled as graphs of systems linked with well-defined set of relations such as RepresentationOf (), ConformsTo (#) and IsTransformedIn (# ).
Foundations of model (driven) (reverse) engineering: Models
- Laboratoire LSR-IMAG Université Joseph Fourier
, 2004
"... Abstract. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) received a lot of attention in the last years, both from academia and industry. However, there is still a debate on which basic concepts form the foundation of MDE. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) from the OMG does not provided clear answers to this quest ..."
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Cited by 31 (4 self)
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Abstract. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) received a lot of attention in the last years, both from academia and industry. However, there is still a debate on which basic concepts form the foundation of MDE. The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) from the OMG does not provided clear answers to this question. This standard instead provides a complex set of interdependent technologies. This paper is the first of a series aiming at defining the foundations of MDE independently from a particular technology. A megamodel is introduced in this paper and incrementally refined in further papers from the series. This paper is devoted to a single concept, the concept of model, and to a single relation, the RepresentationOf relation. The lack of strong foundations for the MDA ’ 4-layers meta-pyramid leads to a common mockery: "So, MDA is just about Egyptology?!". This paper is the pilot of the series called "From Ancient Egypt to Model Driven Engineering". The various episodes of this series show that Egyptology is actually a good model to study MDE. 1
Towards a Basic Theory to Model Model Driven Engineering
- In Proc. of the UML2004 Int. Workshop on Software Model Engineering
, 2004
"... these concepts related? It is striking to see that, though MDE is supposed to be about precise modelling, MDE core concepts are usually described in natural language or at best, using sketchy "à-la " UML diagrams. These diagrams are very often inconsistent and too vague to reason about. Mo ..."
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Cited by 31 (3 self)
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these concepts related? It is striking to see that, though MDE is supposed to be about precise modelling, MDE core concepts are usually described in natural language or at best, using sketchy "à-la " UML diagrams. These diagrams are very often inconsistent and too vague to reason about. Most of the time, they are neither validated, not even used by their authors. When precise descriptions are provided, it is only to describe a
Automatability of Coupled Evolution of Metamodels and Models in Practice
- MODELS 2008. VOLUME 5301 OF LNCS
, 2008
"... Model-based software development promises to increase productivity by offering modeling languages tailored to a problem domain. Such modeling languages are often defined by a metamodel. In consequence of changing requirements and technological progress, these modeling languages and thus their metamo ..."
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Cited by 28 (12 self)
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Model-based software development promises to increase productivity by offering modeling languages tailored to a problem domain. Such modeling languages are often defined by a metamodel. In consequence of changing requirements and technological progress, these modeling languages and thus their metamodels are subject to change. Manually migrating models to a new version of their metamodel is tedious, error-prone and heavily hampers cost-efficient model-based development practice. Automating model migration in response to metamodel adaptation promises to substantially reduce effort. Unfortunately, little is known about the types of changes occurring during metamodel adaptation in practice and, consequently, to which degree reconciling model migration can be automated. We analyzed the changes that occurred during the evolution history of two industrial metamodels and classified them according to their level of potential automation. Based on the results, we present a list of requirements for effective tool support for coupled evolution of metamodels and models in practice.
An approach for the systematic development of domain-specific languages
- Software: Practice and Experience
, 2009
"... Building tailored software systems for a particular application domain is a complex task. For this reason, domain-specific languages (DSLs) receive a constantly growing attention in recent years. So far the main focus of DSL research is on case studies and experience reports for the development of i ..."
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Cited by 26 (12 self)
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Building tailored software systems for a particular application domain is a complex task. For this reason, domain-specific languages (DSLs) receive a constantly growing attention in recent years. So far the main focus of DSL research is on case studies and experience reports for the development of individual DSLs, design ap-proaches and implementation techniques for DSLs, and the integration of DSLs with other software development approaches on a technical level. In this paper, we identify and describe the different activities that we conduct when engineering a DSL, and describe how these activities can be combined in order to define a tailored DSL engineering process. Our research results are based on the experiences we gained from multiple different DSL development projects and prototyping experiments. 1
Weaving a Debugging Aspect into Domain-Specific Language Grammars
- In SAC ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Applied computing
, 2005
"... A common trend in programming language specification is to generate various tools (e.g., compiler, editor, profiler, and debugger) from a grammar. In such a generative approach, it is desirable to have the definition of a programming language be modularized according to specific concerns specified i ..."
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Cited by 24 (11 self)
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A common trend in programming language specification is to generate various tools (e.g., compiler, editor, profiler, and debugger) from a grammar. In such a generative approach, it is desirable to have the definition of a programming language be modularized according to specific concerns specified in the grammar. However, it is often the case that the corresponding properties of the generated tools are scattered and tangled across the language specification. In this paper, separation of concerns within a programming language specification is demonstrated by considering debugging support within a domain-specific language (DSL). The paper first describes the use of AspectJ to weave the debugging semantics into the code created by a parser generator. The paper outlines several situations when the use of AspectJ is infeasible at separating language specification properties. To accommodate such situations, a second approach is presented that weaves the debugging support directly into a grammar specification using a program transformation engine. A case study for a simple DSL is presented to highlight the benefits of weaving across language specifications defined by grammars.
