Generation of graphical editors for software architecture modeling
Abstract
Many architectural descriptions are written in non-formal ways and stored in proprietary formats which cannot be parsed and thus cannot be automatically evaluated nor extended towards domain specific concepts. This project thesis aims at establishing a formal specification of an architectural model by creating a basic metamodel appropriate for modeling software architecture. To refine the basic software architecture concepts of connector and component towards a notation that reflects domain specific concepts, an iterative and incremental mechanism for extending the basic metamodel is proposed. The extended metamodel is enriched by basic OCL constraints which are automatically extracted from the previous model. The creation of models is supported by automatically generated graphical editors. These graphical editors adhere to the domain specific languages defined by their corresponding metamodels and included OCL constraints. These graphical editors are integrated into the development environment Eclipse and were specially tailored towards software architecture modeling.
