The Program Is the Model: Enabling Transformations@run.time

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: Abstract. The increasing application of Model-Driven Engineering in a wide range of domains, in addition to pure code generation, raises the need to manipulate models at runtime, as part of regular programs. Moreover, certain kinds of programming tasks can be seen as model transformation tasks, and thus we could take advantage of model transformation technology in order to facilitate them. In this paper we report on our works to bridge the gap between regular programming and model transformation by enabling the manipulation of Java APIs as models. Our approach is based on the specification of a mapping between a Java API (e.g., Swing) and a meta-model describing it. A model transformation definition is written against the API metamodel and we have built a compiler that generates the corresponding Java bytecode according to the mapping. We present several application scenarios and discuss the mapping between object-oriented metamodelling and the Java object system. Our proposal has been validated by a prototype implementation which is also contributed.