Finally, although the list will
necessarily be most colored by our own experiences and subjective viewpoint, we
have always encouraged a frank exchange of views with other tool developers, and
hopefully have been able to learn from their experiences and solutions??”whether or
not we have implemented similar features in MetaEdit+.
We will divide the features into the following categories:
. Meta-metamodel
. Notation
366 TOOLS FOR DSM
. Generators
. Supporting the metamodeler
. Generic modeling tool functionality
. Tool integration
The ?¬?rst three of these are the most important, as they form the foundation on
which the remaining three are built. For the ?¬?rst two items, Chapter 10 looked at how
to create a modeling language and notation, but not so much at the details of what
features tools should offer for these. Chapter 11 however already discussed the various
kinds of generator facilities found in tools (Section 11.2), so here we shall focus
mostly on the ?¬?rst two items: the meta-metamodel and notation facilities.
14.3.1 Meta-Metamodel
The meta-metamodel is in effect the metamodeling language: the set of concepts
provided to the metamodeler for building his metamodel. Just as each element in a
model is an instance of a concept in the metamodel, so also is each concept in the
metamodel an instance of a concept in the meta-metamodel.
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