DeltaEcore-A Model-Based Delta Language Generation Framework

Abstract

Software product lines (SPLs) and software ecosystems (SECOs) represent families of closely related software systems in terms of configurable variable assets. Delta modeling is an approach for capturing variability resulting from different configurations and for deriving concrete software products of an SPL or SECO through transformation. Even though the general concepts of delta modeling are languageindependent, custom delta languages are required for all source languages, which are tedious to create and lack interoperability due to different implementation technologies. In this paper, we present a framework to automatically derive delta languages for textual or graphical languages given as EMOF-based meta models. We further illustrate how to automatically generate the syntax and large parts of the semantics of the derived delta language by inspecting the source language's meta model. We demonstrate our approach by applying our implementation DeltaEcore to four selected source languages.