Bridging Grammarware and Modelware

In Software Engineering many text-based languages and supporting tools are used, forming the grammarware technical space. Currently model driven engineering is the new emerging paradigm for software engineering, which uses modelling languages and tools, forming the modelware technical space. Transition to the new technical space and interoperability between these two technical spaces is needed in many development scenarios. Building a bridge between these two technical spaces is a tedious task, that has to be repeated for each language to be transformed. Therefore, we propose a generic bridge between grammarware and modelware technical spaces, that can generate a specific bridge based on the EBNF of a given language semi-automatically. The generation comprises of two steps, (1) automatic generation of metamodel corresponding to the EBNF and (2) annotations to provide the additional semantics not captured by the EBNF. The generated bridge is capable of bi-directional transformations between sentences (programs) and corresponding models and can be used in re-engineering applications and for integration of text-based and model-based tools. The benefits of this approach are rapid development and correctness.