The area of transformations has been in a slow motion due to the contributor's
workload dealing with the meta modelling tools. New project participants will
be contributing into this area in near future. Juha Pirhonen is making his
master's thesis about an import tool for MetaEdit+ and Hui Liu's Query Editor
will be the backbone of new transformation tools.
As the individual methods are usually combined into methodologies, there is a
need to support the interchange of development data between the various
methods. Transformations can also be used to define "bridges" between different
tools, for example CASE tools and CSCW tools.
In developing transformations we have the following objectives:
specifying a transformation language, and its support system, that can be used
to transform descriptions between methods and between different tools needed in
software development,
applying this language together with metamodeling languages for methodology
development in MetaEdit+,
applying this language to define import / export facilities for the MetaEdit+
environment.
We have developed a transformation system for MetaEdit that has been used for
several purposes. Some results of this work have been published in (Rossi et
al, 1992). Current work focuses on other available environments to define
requirements for a more complete transformation system. We are also developing
import mechanisms for the MetaEdit+ environment. As a part of this work a
student project at the department of Mathematics (Univ. of Jyväskylä)
developed software that can be used to transform textual representations of
models into a graphical format.
In the future we will develop a new version of MetaEdit's transformation system
and exploit the accumulated ideas there. There is also a need to develop a new
transformation language for the GOPRR datamodel. The developed system will be
tested by implementing with it the Import/Export functions for the CDIF (Common
Data Interchange Format).