The Metaview system for many specification environments

Abstract

roviding adequate support environments for the development of software has been a recognized problem for several years. Unfortunately, support environments have emerged only recently that seriously aid the development of large software systems. Perhaps the most well-known support of these efforts is the Ada programming-support environment. However, it focuses on the life cycle's implementation stage, with facilities t o improve program reliability and t o promote the development of portable software and software-development tools.Several support environments have been developed to aid the requirements-analysis and design stages.',* Recently, commercial CASE environments have been introduced that apply these concepts to the entire life cycle. In addition, some support systems, such as the User Software-Engineering methodology,' extend system analysis and design support with prototyping facilities.McAllister worked on this research while at the University of Saskatchewan. 0740-74S9/88/0300/0030/$01 .OO 01988 IEEE BrunswickThe effort to develop such support environments is considerable, as are enhancements or changes t o a s u p p o r t environment to address an application's special requirements. To significantly reduce the implementation effort of producing a support environment, some researchers have proposed m e t a~y s t e m s .~ A metasystem's primary purpose is to generate automatically the major parts of a particular software-development environment. Metasystems are systems used to develop system-development environments just as compiler-writing systems are systems used to develop compilers. Figure 1 shows a metasystem's architectural overview. Figure l a shows the components of an environment that could be used to specify some aspects of a system description. Many specification-environment support facilities (commonly called tool support) are included, such as graphics interfaces, graphics layout, and query languages. Figure l b shows the generalized metasystem approach to developing an environment-support facility that includes an environment-model IEEE Software

Meta‐CASE: Is the game worth the candle?

“…Commercial products such as Toolbuilder of IPSYS Software (IPSYS Software pic, Macclesfield, England), Methods Workbench of 1DSE Metasoft Ltd (IDSE Metasoft Ltd, Camberley, England) and MetaDesign of Meta Software Corporation (Meta Software Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) or academic products such as RAMATIC (Bergsten et alt 1989), Metaview (Sorenson et aL, 1988) and MetaPlex (Chen & Nunamaker Jr, 1989), claim to generate CASE tools tailored to specific methods and organi zations. Even a tool that supports the modification of meta-models exists -MetaEdit (MetaCase Consulting, Jyvaskyla, Finland (Smolander et al, 1991)).…”

Evaluating and comparing language workbenches

“…Perhaps the earliest tool which we would now think of as a language workbench was SEM [4], which was later followed by tools such as MetaPlex [5], Metaview [6], QuickSpec [7], and MetaEdit [8], Centaur [9], the Synthesizer generator [10], the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment [11], Gem-Mex/Montages [12], LRC [13], and Lisa [14]. Most of these systems operated on textual languages and were intended to work with formal specifications of General Purpose Languages (GPLs) [15].…”

A framework for capturing design rationale using granularity hierarchies

“…In a step towards formalization for a better control on the model in terms of implementation, verification and validation, we specify the 'Extended Potts Model' through a set of schemata which includes a set of entity types, relationship types and attributes based on an EARA based meta-model proposed by Sorenson et. a1 [13]. Having been able to capture snapshots of the design rationale with the 'Extended Potts Model', we now consider the problem of representing the evolving set of design-process artifacts.…”