Generating tools from graph-based specifications

This paper describes an approach for generating graphical, structure-oriented software engineering tools from graph-based specifications. The approach is based on the formal meta modeling of visual languages using graph rewriting systems. Besides the syntactical and semantical rules of the language, these meta models include knowledge from the application domains. This enables the resulting tools to provide the user with high level operations for editing, analysis and execution of models. Tools are constructed by generating source code from the meta model of the visual language, which is written in the very high level programming language PROGRES. The source code is integrated into a framework which is responsible for the invocation of commands and the visualization of graphs. As a case study, a visual language for modeling development processes together with its formal meta model is introduced. The paper shows how a process management tool based on this meta model is generated and reports on our experiences with this approach. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.