MetaEdit+: defining and using domain-specific modeling languages and code generators

  • Authors:

  • Juha-Pekka Tolvanen;Matti Rossi

  • Affiliations:

  • MetaCase Consulting, Jyvaskyla, Finland;Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '03 Companion of the 18th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

MetaEdit+ is an environment that allows building modeling tools and generators fitting to application domains, without having to write a single line of code. The capability to define modeling tools and generators is relevant as it provides the ability to raise the abstraction of design work from code to domain concepts, and a raise in abstraction leads to an imminent raise in productivity, as illustrated by the past years' experiences.In domain-specific modeling and MetaEdit+, one expert defines a domain-specific language as a metamodel containing the domain concepts and rules, and specifies the mapping from that to code in a domain-specific code generator. For the method implementation, MetaEdit+ provides a metamodeling language and tool suite for defining the method concepts, their properties, associated rules, symbols, checking reports, and generators. Once the expert defines a modeling method, or even a partial prototype, the rest of the team can start to use it in MetaEdit+ to make models with the modeling language and the required code is automatically generated from those models. Based on the metamodel, MetaEdit+ automatically provides CASE tool functionality: diagramming editors, browsers, generators, multi-user/project/platform support, etc.The MetaEdit+ demo will focus on showing how the domain-specific languages and generators are made; complete with several examples of domain-specific methods and related code generators.