Keeping clients' models up-to-date with Edelta
Lorenzo Bettini, Davide Di Ruscio, Amleto Di Salle, Ludovico Iovino, Alfonso Pierantonio · 2024
Metamodels and models are artifacts that must evolve together to keep consistency and validity. Developers have little control over client-created models, and ensuring consistency with new versions of model-based applications requires additional effort. In this paper, we extend Edelta (a Java framework for the co-evolution and refactoring of EMF metamodels and models) to support metamodel developers in deploying their model-based applications together with the code to update clients' models transparently when metamodels change in new versions of the applications. We demonstrate our approach by implementing an EMF application with a typical EMF-generated editor. The application's clients will have their models automatically and transparently updated to new versions, independently of how old their models are.