Harmonizing textual and graphical visualizations of domain specific models
Colin Atkinson, Ralph Gerbig · 2013
Domain-specific models, and the modeling languages that support them, have played a central role in the success of model-driven development and its ability to bridge the abstraction gap between software implementation technologies and human developers. However, the current generation of domain-specific modeling tools is firmly split into two camps --- those that support textual domain-specific languages and those that support graphical domain-specific languages. Both camps have enjoyed significant success, but at the time of writing no mainstream tool supports both at the same time. This stops developers from swapping freely between textual and graphical visualizations of a given subject of interest, even if each form has clear advantages and/or disadvantages for different stakeholders. In this paper we present an environment which offers a solution to this problem by strictly separating concerns for notation (i.e. concrete syntax) and concerns for concepts (i.e. abstract syntax) and allowing them to be connected and mixed dynamically as required.