Meta-Modeling and Graph Grammars: Generating Development Environments for Modeling Languages

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There is a trend to develop domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) with corresponding integrated development environments (IDEs) for model-driven development of software. Such IDEs include but are not limited to model editors as well as interpreters and/or translators of models. Additional tools such as high-level model version management and test support with automatic test case generation and model migrators are of great use. The development of such IDEs, however, is costly and requires tool development experiences. Therefore, meta-tools have been developed which reduce tool development to their domain-specific tasks. But still a lot of manual work and tool-related experiences are needed to use these meta-tools in the right way.The overall aim of this project is to raise the degree of automation w.r.t. tool support for modeling languages, especially DSMLs. Since tool development seems to be the largest obstacle for using modeling languages, we intend to identify core problems and to develop new concepts, methods and meta-tools to make tool development for modeling languages faster and easier. In a certain sense, we consider to lift the specification of domain-specific tool environments to a higher abstraction level, i.e., to make it more model-driven. To reach this aim, inherent problems such as interactively generating and repairing models need to be solved and are best considered on the formal level. We use the theory of graph transformation to systematically tackle them. Solutions found are implemented based on the Eclipse Modeling Project and evaluated at a variety of modeling languages.