Designing an Adaptive Weaving Workbench using Eclipse Contributions1

Establishing links between models are a fundamental issue in model driven engineering (MDE) practices. There are many situations where it is necessary to create links between models, for instance traceability, transformation specification, composition operations, model evolution, etc. Every application scenario may require the creation of different types of links. The existence of many application scenarios and link types motivates the development of sets of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) to capture links between model elements. We propose using weaving models [1] to do this. A weaving model conforms to a weaving metamodel. The creation of weaving models requires adapted user interfaces, for example with link management primitives, or matching algorithms. Eclipse EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) [3] is a plugin for Eclipse [2] that provides basic model management primitives, such as reading, updating, inserting, serialization, as well as and a standard user interface. However there is no specific support for creating weavings models. In this paper we present an adaptive workbench for developing weaving architectures, calling AMW (ATLAS Model Weaver) [1]. It is based on a generic weaving metamodel that supports basic link management (a generic weaving DSL). The workbench uses the dynamic model management API of EMF. It is based in the contribution mechanism [5] of Eclipse: we develop an extensible workbench where other developers can contribute to it with other plugins. We define extension points to handle with specific requirements for creating adaptive weaving plugins. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a set of requirements to implement a weaving workbench. Section 3 describes a weaving metamodel as a core DSL. Section 4 presents the adaptive weaving workbench based on the Eclipse contribution mechanism. Section 5 concludes.