Generation of visual editors as eclipse plug-ins

ABSTRACT

Visual Languages (VLs) play an important role in software system development. Especially when looking at well-defined domains, a broad variety of domain specific visual languages are used for the development of new applications. These languages are typically developed specifically for a certain domain in a way that domain concepts occur as primitives in the language alphabet. Visual modeling environments are needed to support rapid development of domain-specific solutions.In this contribution we present a general approach for defining visual languages and for generating language-specific tool environments. The visual language definition is again given in a visual manner and precise enough to completely generate the visual environment. The underlying technology is Eclipse with its plug-in capabilities on the one hand, and formal graph transformation techniques on the other hand. More precisely, we present an Eclipse plug-in generating Java code for visual modeling plug-ins which can be directly executed in the Eclipse Runtime-Workbench.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments

Additional Classification:
  F. Theory of Computation
  F.4 MATHEMATICAL LOGIC AND FORMAL LANGUAGES
      F.4.3 Formal Languages
          Subjects: Algebraic language theory

General Terms:
Design, Languages, Theory

Keywords:
eclipse, generation, graph transformation, visual editor plug-in