Flexibility in Modeling Languages and Tools: A Call to Arms
Date of Publication:
June 2009Associated Research Groups:
Critical Systems Research GroupAssociated Research Groups:
Minnesota Extensible Language ToolsPublication Files:
Abstract:
In model-based development, the software development effort is
centered around a formal description of the proposed software system;
a description that can be subjected to various types of analysis and
code generation. Based on years of experience with model-based
development and formal modeling we believe that the following
conjectures describe fundamental obstacles to wide adoption of formal
modeling and the potential for automation that comes with it; (1) no
single modeling notation will suit all, or even most, modeling needs,
(2) no analysis tool will fit all, or even most, analysis tasks, and
(3) flexible and stable tools must be made available for realistic
evaluations and technology transfer. These conjectures form the basis
for the call to arms outlined in this report.
To make automated software engineering techniques more useful for more
types of developers and allow us to move forward as a community it is
crucial that we develop the foundation for building extensible and
flexible modeling language processing tools. New
common-infrastructure-based approaches are needed as traditional
approaches based on file-based processing of intermediate language
representations are not adequate. In this report we outline and
illustrate the problem and discuss a possible solution. To initiate
the discussions in the community, we hypothesize that languages and
tools built using higher-order attribute grammars with forwarding can
serve as a basis for such flexible language processing tools; tools
that will allow us to unify our efforts and help bring our collective
work to a broader audience.
Venue:
International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer: Volume 11, Issue 3 (2009), Page 203-215Bibtex:
@article{vanwykheimdah09sttt,
author = "Van Wyk, Eric and Heimdahl, Mats",
title = "Flexibility in Modeling Languages and Tools: A Call to Arms",
journal = "Software Tools for Technology Transfer",
volume = 11,
number = 3,
year = 2009,
pages = "203--215"
}
