Towards automatic generation of web-based modeling editors

Abstract

With the current trend of digitalization within a multitude of different domains, the need raises for effective approaches to capture domain knowledge. Modeling languages, especially, domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), are considered as an important method to involve domain experts in the system development. However, current approaches for developing DSMLs and generating modeling editors are mostly focusing on reusing the infrastructures provided by programming IDEs. On the other hand, several approaches exist for developing Web-based modeling editors using dedicated JavaScript frameworks. However, these frameworks do not exploit the high automation potential from DSML approaches to generate modeling editors from language specifications. Thus, the development of Web-based modeling editors requires still major programming efforts and dealing with recurring tasks. In this paper, we combine the best of both worlds by reusing the language specification techniques of DSML engineering approaches for generating Web-based modeling editors. In particular, we show how to combine two concrete approaches, namely Eugenia from DSML engineering and JointJS as a protagonist from JavaScript frameworks, and demonstrate the automation potential of establishing Web-based modeling editors. We present first results concerning two reference DSML examples which have been realized by our approach as Web-based modeling editors.