TOPCASED adds little new and is only at version 0.3.0, so we will look at GEMS.
GEMS is an extension to GMF built by Jules White at Vanderbilt University. It
aims to remove some of the low-level work of usingGMF, and focuses particularly on
adding constraint solving to the resulting editors. Constraints can be expressed in
Prolog, giving better expressive power than Java or OCL, and can be used either to
provide a simple check of a model or to add newelements to a model automatically, so
that the constraint is ful?¬?lled.
A commercial, closed-source Eclipse plug-in with a similar approach to GMF is
XMF-Mosaic from Xactium. Again, multiple modeling languages are used to
describe a DSM solution. In this case, there are also languages for specifying code
generation: modeling language concepts are mapped to simple object-oriented
programming concepts like classes or methods, and separate generic mappings are
provided from these concepts to speci?¬?c languages like Java.
14.5 SUMMARY
DSM environments are one of the most conceptually complex types of software.
When made well, they can allow one of the greatest ranges of behavior for relatively
simple input. Turning such complexity and power into apparent simplicity is however
a dif?¬?cult task. Building the foundation of such an environment without signi?¬?cant
experience in DSM is possible, but such foundations rarely have the necessary
SUMMARY 395
qualities of stability and ?¬‚exibility.
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