Bridging the MS/DSL Tools and the Eclipse Modeling Framework
Résumé
Model Driven Engineering is based on a number of principles that may be applied in different contexts. Nowadays several environments employ the MDE principles: Model Driven Architecture (MDA™), Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), Microsoft Domain-Specific Language tools (MS/DSL), and many more. Focusing only on one context and ignoring other environments and platforms, based on different conventions, standards or protocols would be unwise because one of the desired properties of models is their ability to be exchanged between different contexts. Due to their abstraction expression level, models should ideally be more adaptable to various operational environments than conventional code. In other words, OMG models and Microsoft models among others should be able to be exchanged between the corresponding environments. In this paper we focus on exchange of models created in these two major industrial platforms: EMF and Microsoft DSL. The capability to exchange models between an EMF and a corresponding MS/DSL based system requires an abstract understanding of both architectures and a precise organization of the interoperability scheme. This paper describes the first results of a project in this area and presents the lessons learnt in this work.