Tool support for model transformations: on solutions using internal languages

Abstract

Model-driven engineering (MDE) has proven to be a useful approach to cope with todays ever growing complexity in the development of software systems, yet it is not widely applied in industry. As suggested by multiple studies, tool support is a major factor for this lack of adoption. Existing tools for MDE, in particular model transformation approaches, are often developed by small teams and cannot keep up with advanced tool support for mainstream languages such as provided by IntelliJ or Visual Studio. In this paper, we propose an approach to leverage existing tool support for model transformation using internal model transformation languages and investigate design decisions and their consequences for inherited tool support. The findings are used for the design of an internal model transformation language on the .NET platform.