A Practical Approach for Extending DSMLs by Composing their Metamodels

Abstract

Domain specific modeling (DSM) has become popular in the software development field during these last years. It allows to design an application using a domain specific modeling language (DSML) and to generate an end-solution software product directly from models. However providing a new DSML is a complex and costly job. This can be reduced by the reuse of existing DSMLs to compose new ones trough a metamodel composition approach. This paper provides a composition rules based code generator facility for extending DSMLs. In doing so, it proposes three rules to compose DSMLs by composing there metamodels: reference rule, specialization rule and fusion rule. The results of an exploratory case study on using these rules are depicted. In addition a proof of concept of the code generator facility which generates the necessary infrastructure to quickly build new DSMLs is implemented and applied to the case study. The benefits of our approach are measured relying on three indicators: the reduced development time, the reused software components and the gain on learnability.