A generative Approach for creating Eclipse Sirius Editors for generic Systems

Abstract

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is getting more and more important for modeling, analyzing, and simulating complicated systems. It can also be used for both documenting and generating source code, which is less error-prone than a manually written one. For defining a model, it is common to have a graphical representation that can be edited through an editor. Creating such an editor for a given domain may be a difficult task for first-time users and a tedious, repetitive, and error-prone task for experienced ones. This paper introduces a new automated flow to ease the creation of ready-to-use Sirius editors based on a model, graphically defined by the domain experts, which describe their domains’ structure. We provide different model transformations to generate the required artifacts to obtain a fully-fledged Sirius editor based on a generated domain metamodel. The generated editor can then be distributed as an Eclipse application or as a collaborative web application. Thanks to this generative approach, it is possible to reduce the cost of refactoring the domain’s model in successive iterations, as only the final models need to be updated to conform to the latest format. At the same time, the editor gets generated and hence updated automatically at practically no cost.