Building Modeling Tools Based on Metamodeling and Product Line Technologies

With the evolution of existing modeling languages and the emergence of more and more new modeling languages, it is necessary to rapidly build the corresponding software modeling tools with good quality. However, modeling tools for larger modeling languages are usually diversity in function and complexity in implementation technology. Taking building modeling tools as a domain, this paper presents an approach to building software modeling tools based on metamodeling and product line technologies. The paper provides the concept system of the approach and a feature model from diverse functions of modeling tools in order to specify the commonality and variability of the tools by deeply making the domain analysis, discusses the design and implementation of a general tool framework that provides the conveniences for reusing components and generating code for components, and specifies the mapping between the feature model and the components for modeling tools.