How a Relaxation of the Strictness Definition Can Benefit MDD Approaches With Meta Model Hierarchies

Meta modeling is an essential aspect of many MDD approaches. However, there are many different views on how such aspects as instantiation semantics, choice of model elements, or causal connections of layers should be handled. One common school of thought proposes the concept of strict meta modeling which provides more structure to instantiation and avoids “illogical” scenarios such as meta classes instantiating themselves. In this paper, we propose a relaxation to the strictness definition and describe the advantages we see in this for the automatic generation of code. As a proof of concept we present a small implementation in Java/XSLT which converts a simple relaxed model to Java code with JDO persistence.