Extending Grammars and Metamodels for Reuse – The Reuseware Approach

2008 research paper

In Special Issue on Language Engineering, volume 2(3) of IET Software
with: Jakob Henriksson, Florian Heidenreich, Steffen Zschaler, and Uwe Aßmann

The trend toward domain-specific languages leads to an ever-growing plethora of highly specialized languages. Developers of such languages focus on their specific domains rather than on technical challenges of language design. Generic features of languages are rarely included in special-purpose languages. One very important feature is the ability to formulate partial programs in separate encapsulated entities, which can be composed into complete programs in a well-defined manner. This paper presents a language-independent approach for adding useful constructs for defining components. We discuss the underlying concepts and describe a composition environment and tool supporting these ideas – the Reuseware Composition Framework. To evaluate our approach we enrich the (Semantic) Web query language Xcerpt with an additional useful reuse concept—modules.