Combining a Declarative Language and an Imperative Language for Bidirectional Incremental Model Transformations

Matthias Bank, Thomas Buchmann, Bernhard Westfechtel

2021

Abstract

Bidirectional incremental model transformations are crucial for supporting round-trip engineering in model-driven software development. A variety of domain-specific languages (DSLs) have been proposed for the declarative specification of bidirectional transformations. Unfortunately, previous proposals fail to provide the expressiveness required for solving practically relevant bidirectional transformation problems. To address this shortcoming, we propose a layered approach: On the declarative level, a bidirectional transformation is specified concisely in a small and light-weight external DSL. From this specification, code is generarated into an object-oriented framework, on top of which the behavior of the transformation may be complemented and adapted in an imperative internal DSL. An evaluation with the help of a well-known transformation case demonstrates that this layered hybrid approach is both concise and expressive, and also scalable.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bank M., Buchmann T. and Westfechtel B. (2021). Combining a Declarative Language and an Imperative Language for Bidirectional Incremental Model Transformations.In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD, ISBN 978-989-758-487-9, pages 15-27. DOI: 10.5220/0010188200150027

in Bibtex Style

@conference{modelsward21,
author={Matthias Bank and Thomas Buchmann and Bernhard Westfechtel},
title={Combining a Declarative Language and an Imperative Language for Bidirectional Incremental Model Transformations},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,},
year={2021},
pages={15-27},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010188200150027},
isbn={978-989-758-487-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development - Volume 1: MODELSWARD,
TI - Combining a Declarative Language and an Imperative Language for Bidirectional Incremental Model Transformations
SN - 978-989-758-487-9
AU - Bank M.
AU - Buchmann T.
AU - Westfechtel B.
PY - 2021
SP - 15
EP - 27
DO - 10.5220/0010188200150027