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Agile Specification of Code Generators for Model-Driven Engineering

Authors:
Kevin Lano
Qiaomu Xue
Shekoufeh Kolahdouz-Rahimi

Keywords: Code generation; Agile development; UML; Model-Driven Engineering

Abstract:
The production of code or other text from software models is an essential task in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approaches for software development. Automated code generation is key to the productivity improvements observed in MDE approaches. Nonetheless, there has been a lack of systematic research into optimising the construction of code generators, and in the current state of the art such generators are usually developed manually, which involves detailed programming in 3GLs, or in specialised code generation languages. In either case, high expertise in the source language abstract syntax is necessary. In this paper, we survey different approaches for the construction of code generators, and we define an approach for declarative specification of code generators by text-to-text mappings, in terms of the concrete syntax of both source and target languages. We show that this approach enables the rapid development of code generators, which are also more concise and efficient compared to previous generators.

Pages: 9 to 15

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: October 18, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-827-3

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from October 18, 2020 to October 22, 2020