Section: New Software and Platforms

Kermeta

Participants: Benoit Combemale [correspondant], Olivier Barais, Arnaud Blouin, Didier Vojtisek, Benoit Baudry, Thomas Degueule, David Mendez, Erwan Bousse, Francois Tanguy, Fabien Coulon.

Nowadays, object-oriented meta-languages such as MOF (Meta-Object Facility) are increasingly used to specify domain-specific languages in the model-driven engineering community. However, these meta-languages focus on structural specifications and have no built-in support for specifications of operational semantics. Integrated with the Ecore industrial standard and aligned with the EMOF 2.0 OMG standard, the Kermeta language consists in a extension to these meta-languages to support behavior definition. The language adds precise action specifications with static type checking and genericity at the meta level. Based on object-orientation and aspect orientation concepts, the Kermeta language adds model specific concepts.

Kermeta is used in several use cases:

• to give a precise semantic of the behavior of a metamodel, which then can be simulated;

• to act as a model transformation language;

• to act as a constraint language.

In 2014, we have continued the refactoring of Kermeta to leverage on Xtend. The Kermeta action language is now defined as an extension of Xtend, by proposing model-specific features (e.g., model type, containment, opposite) and an open class mechanism for aspect weaving. The main objective of this new refactoring was to benefit from the non model–specific features of Xtend (including the basics of the action language and its respective tooling such as editor, type checker and compiler), and to focus in our development on innovative solutions for MDE.

More precisely, in addition to an Xtend extension dedicated to model manipulation, we started to integrate in Kermeta various facilities to support software language engineering (slicing, pruning, reuse, variability management, etc). In 2014, we improved this software language engineering feature (currently named k3sle/Melange) in order to offer a functional model typing system allowing safe model polymorphism. This system enables reuse of algorithms and transformations accross different metamodels, as well as language inheritance, evolution and interoperability.

Moreover, while this version of Kermeta is a DSML development workbench that provides good support for developping independent DSMLs, little or no support is provided for integrated use of multiple DSMLs. The lack of support for explicitly relating concepts expressed in different DSMLs makes it very difficult for developers to reason about information spread across models describing different system aspects.

According to Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=kermeta+model ), the Kermeta platform was used or cited in more than 1300 papers.