Model-driven Java code refactoring

Refactoring is an important technique for restructuring code to improve its design and increase programmer productivity and code reuse. Performing refactorings manually, however, is tedious, time consuming and error-prone. Thus, providing an automated support for them is necessary. Unfortunately even in our days, such automation is still not easily achieved and requires formal specifications of the refactoring process. Moreover, extensibility and tool development automation are factors that should be taken into consideration when designing and implementing automated refactorings. In this paper, we introduce a model-driven approach where refactoring features, such as code representation, analysis and transformation adopt models as first-class artifacts. We aim at exploring the value of model transformation and code generation when formalizing refactorings and developing tool support. The presented approach is applied to the refactoring of Java code using a prototypical implementation based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework, a language workbench, a Java metamodel and a set of OMG standards.