Model transformation languages for domain-specific workbenches

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are software languages which are tailored to a specific application domain. DSLs enable domain experts to create domain-specific models, that is, high-level descriptions of domain knowledge. As any other software languages, DSLs rely on language tools which provide assistance for processing and managing domain-specific models. A domain-specific workbench is an integrated set of such tools for a DSL. A recently proposed approach is to automatically generate a domain-specific workbench for a DSL from a description of that DSL. However, existing tools which apply this approach do not support to describe and generate editable domain-specific views. A view is a part of domain-specific workbench that presents only one aspect of a model, for example, its hierarchical structure. This dissertation presents special model transformation languages which support the description of view synchronization in a generated domain-specific workbench. This allows a multi-view domain-specific workbench to be created with existing tools for language tool generation. We present a generated domain-specific workbench for the nanophysics domain and present a taxonomy of synchronization types. This allows us to precisely define what model transformations are required for view synchronization in that workbench. According to these requirements, we develop two transformation languages by adapting existing ones. In particular, we develop a bidirectional transformation language. With such a language one can describe a relation which defines whether two models are in sync and let the synchronization logic be inferred automatically. We implement model transformation languages as internal DSLs – that is, embedded as expressive libraries – in the Scala programming language and use Scala’s type checking for static verification of transformations and their composition.