Journal "Software Engineering"
a journal on theoretical and applied science and technology
ISSN 2220-3397
Journal "Software Engineering"
a journal on theoretical and applied science and technology
ISSN 2220-3397
Issue N9 2017 year
Model-oriented approach to software development presumes the visual models usage at the process of software products creation. This approach can involve customer representatives, future users at the software development process. For automatic source code generation in the target language it is necessary to describe the rules for visual models transformation. There are various approaches to converting visual models: AGG, GReAT, VIATRA, QVT, ATL, MTBE, etc. However, they all make high requirements on the level of the users skill, so their use is difficult. In addition, most of them use only text languages to describe transformations. The language workbench MetaLanguage is a tool for developing visual domain-specific languages, creating models using these languages and transforming created models. To increase the functionality of the transformation component of the MetaLanguage language workbench, a text-based domain-specific language was developed to describe visual model transformations into other graphical notations or textual representation. The language contains the conditional statement, the loop statement, the ability to specify arithmetic expressions over the values of the model elements attributes, and predefined function call. Despite the fact that TDSLs constructions are similar to the corresponding high-level languages constructions, the language is not "cluttered" with unnecessary elements, which makes it easy to use and understand for different categories of users. The language interpreter is implemented in the MetaLanguage tool.