Systematic generation of standard compliant tool support of diagrammatic modeling languages
Résumé
In the Model-Driven Engineering community, the abstract syntax of modeling languages is usually defined and implemented using metamodeling techniques. However, it is not the case for the concrete syntax of graphical modeling languages. Indeed, this concern is mostly specified by informal means. This practice leaves considerable leeway in the implementation and raises several standards compliance issues. Hence, toolsmiths can only rely on their interpretation of the standard and lack of systematic way to build conforming tool support. In this context, a first normative specification of the concrete syntax of UML 2.5 has been recently released using Diagram Definition. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses those formal specifications to systematically generate modeling language tool support that guarantees compliance to standard notation. We assess the approach on a subset of the UML class diagram implemented within the open-source Papyrus tool.