MetaTT - uma abordagem baseada em metamodelos para a escrita de transformações de modelo para texto.

Abstract

Model Driven Development (MDD) is a well-established area in the academic and industrial software engineering communities. A number of benefits are inherent from the adoption of MDD, i.e., a high level of automation and reuse. However, to achieve these benefits it is necessary that its artifacts (models, metamodels and transformations) are constructed, maintained and used properly, which requires time and effort from the development team in charge. Some techniques and tools to support metamodeling activities and the development of transformations have been proposed in order to guide the activities of MDD, enabling its application and a better use of its potential for automation and reuse. With respect to the writing of model-to-text (M2T) transformations, some works discuss the use of such kind of transformations applied in specific areas, but they do not address how to design and write them regardless of the metamodeled domain and with focus on incorporating good design decisions in the elaboration of the transformations. Other works address the problem of concrete syntax generation from models but do not focus on M2T transformations. In this dissert;!!ion, we propose MetaTT, an approach that includes the proposal of a common architecture for M2T syntax generators and a technique to guide the writing of the transformation rules based on the structure of the metamodels. MetaTT significantly reduces the effort made by the developer in the construction of transformations and is especially useful when you need to handle large metamodels. In addition, we provide a support tool to automate the required tasks and we evaluate its use within different scenarios and using metamodels with varied characteristics.