Engineering of Framework-Specific Modeling Languages

Framework-specific modeling languages (FSMLs) help developers
build applications based on object-oriented frameworks. FSMLs model
abstractions and rules of application programming interfaces (APIs)
exposed by frameworks and can express models of how applications use
APIs. Such models aid developers in understanding, creating, and
evolving application code. We present four exemplar FSMLs and a method
for engineering new FSMLs. The method was created postmortem by
generalizing the experience of building the exemplars and by
specializing existing approaches to domain analysis, software
development, and quality evaluation of models and languages. The
method is driven by the use cases that the FSML under development
should support and the evaluation of the constructed FSML is guided by
two existing quality frameworks. The method description provides
concrete examples for the engineering steps, outcomes, and challenges.
It also provides strategies for making engineering decisions. Our work
offers a concrete example of software language engineering and its
benefits. FSMLs capture existing domain knowledge in language form and
support application code understanding through reverse engineering,
application code creation through forward engineering, and application
code evolution through round-trip engineering.