Toolbuilder added a graphical front end, the METHS system, that could generate
parts of the information captured by these textual languages. More detailed editing
was performed in the textual languages, in the EASEL language (a rather simple
3GL), and through user functions written in C. The results were partially compiled and
partially interpreted by DEASEL, the generic modeling tool runtime. DEASEL
provided standard modeling tool functionality and supported multiple users on a true
repository.
Thus ToolBuilder appears to have provided a usable metaCASE system, but the
time required to build support for a modeling language was long, even according to
IPSYS??™s own marketing material:
Even a completely new method can take only man-months to implement, with
prototypes taking man-weeks. The rapid prototyping nature of ToolBuilder means that
demonstrations can be created in man-days.
This slowness was probably because of the complicated textual languages, and the
separation of the modeling and metamodeling tools. Also, while it was of course a
bene?¬?t that DEASEL provided basic default modeling tool behavior, the description
gave the impression that these defaults were probably insuf?¬?cient for most actual
modeling languages, requiring coding in EASEL or C to specify tool operations.
While ToolBuilder did not succeed as a metaCASE tool, two modeling tools based
on the work on ToolBuilder had more success.
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