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Domain-Specific modelling is increasingly adopted in the software development industry. While textual domain specific languages (DSLs) already have a wide impact, graphical DSLs still need to live up to their full potential. In this paper we describe an approach that reduces the time to create a graphical DSL to hours instead of months. The paper describes a generative approach to the creation of graphical editors for the Eclipse platform. A set of carefully designed textual DSLs together with an EMF meta-model are the input for the generator. The output is an Eclipse plugin for a graphical editor for the intended graphical language. The entire project is made available as open source under the name Spray and is being developed by an active community. This paper focuses on the description of the workflow and provides an introduction into the possibilities through this approach of a graphical modelling environment.
Domain-specific modeling is more and more understood as a comparable solution compared to classical software development. Textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) already have a massive impact in contrast tographical DSLs, they still have to show their full potential. The established textual DSLs are normally generated from a domain specific grammar or maybe other specific textual descriptions. And advantage of textual DSLs is that they can be development cost-efficient.
In this paper, we describe asimilar approach for the creation of graphical DSLs from textual descriptions. We present a set of specially developed textual DSLs to fully describe graphical DSLs based on node and edge diagrams. These are, together with an EMF meta-model, the input for a generator that produces an eclipse-based graphical Editor. The entire project is available as open source under the name MoDiGen.