Metamodel syntactic sheets: An approach for defining textual concrete syntaxes

Abstract

The development process of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) can be tackled from different technical spaces such as XML, Grammarware or Model Driven Engineering (MDE). In the case of using MDE, the definition of a concrete syntax for a textual DSL requires commonly building a bridge between this technical space and Grammarware. Several bridging approaches have been recently proposed in which the existing coupling between concrete and abstract syntaxes causes information duplication in the development process of DSLs. Moreover, reusability of concrete syntaxes has received no attention in these approaches. In this paper we present the MSS (Metamodel Syntactic Sheets) approach for defining textual concrete syntaxes. MSS is intended to promote the reuse of textual concrete syntaxes and to avoid information duplication. In MSS, metamodels are annotated with syntactic properties and a propagation mechanism reduces the number of annotations required as well as the coupling between concrete and abstract syntaxes. Textual concrete syntaxes can be reused by annotating syntactically the metamodeling language. This reuse makes possible to share syntactic idioms (textual conventions) among different DSLs. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.