Exploiting Ecore's Reflexivity for Bootstrapping Domain-Specific Code-Generators

Abstract

This paper shows how the reflexivity of Ecore can be exploited for incrementally bootstrapping domain-specific code generators in the model-driven and service-oriented code generation framework Genesys. Key to this technology is the EMF SIB Generator, which, based on a very small set of manually written code generator services called SIBs, incrementally generates services in a bootstrapping fashion. To this end, it leverages Ecore's metamodel, which is specified in Ecore itself, to iteratively enlarge the set of SIBs until all concepts of Ecore are covered. On this basis, the EMF SIB Generator can then be used to generate all services required for constructing a corresponding code generator for any given metamodel specified in Ecore. This approach can be staightforwardly applied to arbitrary metalevels and elegantly enables the model-driven and service-oriented construction of code generators for Ecore-based domain-specific languages.