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Mashup of metalanguages and its implementation in the Kermeta language workbench

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Abstract

With the growing use of domain-specific languages (DSL) in industry, DSL design and implementation goes far beyond an activity for a few experts only and becomes a challenging task for thousands of software engineers. DSL implementation indeed requires engineers to care for various concerns, from abstract syntax, static semantics, behavioral semantics, to extra-functional issues such as runtime performance. This paper presents an approach that uses one metalanguage per language implementation concern. We show that the usage and combination of those metalanguages is simple and intuitive enough to deserve the term mashup. We evaluate the approach by completely implementing the non-trivial fUML modeling language, a semantically sound and executable subset of the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

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Notes

  1. The concrete syntax is achieved thanks to a full compatibility with all EMF-based tools for concrete syntax, such as the de facto standards EMFText (see http://www.emftext.org) and XText (see http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/).

  2. See http://portal.modeldriven.org/.

  3. See http://portal.modeldriven.org/project/foundationalUML.

  4. This is one definition in the community. For some researchers, “metamodel” sometimes referred to abstract syntax plus static semantics.

  5. https://wiki.scala-lang.org/display/SYGN/Design-by-contract.

  6. In Scala, the classes and traits inheritance hierarchy forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The term linearization refers to the algorithm used to “flatten” this graph for the purposes of resolving method lookup priorities, constructor invocation order, binding of super, etc. The linearization defines the order in which method lookup occurs. We refer the interested reader to [17] for an exhaustive explanation of the Scala’s class linearization mechanism.

  7. See https://gforge.inria.fr/forum/forum.php?forum_id=11075.

  8. See http://www.emftext.org/index.php/EMFText.

  9. See http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/.

  10. http://goo.gl/4RR9k.

  11. See http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/.

  12. See http://scala-tools.org/mvnsites/maven-scala-plugin/.

  13. See http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/tools/fsc.html.

  14. cf. http://gemoc.org.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, INRIA, University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France

    Jean-Marc Jézéquel, Benoit Combemale, Olivier Barais & François Fouquet

  2. LIFL, INRIA, University of Lille 1, Lille, France

    Martin Monperrus

Authors
  1. Jean-Marc Jézéquel
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  2. Benoit Combemale
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  3. Olivier Barais
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  4. Martin Monperrus
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  5. François Fouquet
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Correspondence to Benoit Combemale.

Additional information

Communicated by Prof. Robert France.

The authors gracefully thank all present and past members of the Triskell team at IRISA and Inria for their contributions to the ideas and tools behind the Kermeta language workbench. A special thanks to André Fonseca (former Master student in the team) who worked on the Kermeta-based implementation of fUML.

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Jézéquel, JM., Combemale, B., Barais, O. et al. Mashup of metalanguages and its implementation in the Kermeta language workbench. Softw Syst Model 14, 905–920 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0354-4

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