UTMF: An agile approach to domain specific modeling languages

This dissertation discusses a new agile approach to creating domain specific modeling languages. With the advent of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and modern object-oriented methods and programming languages, the notion of creating custom, domain specific modeling languages has gained prominence in the software modeling community. A number of tools to create modeling languages are hosted in modern Integrative Development Environments (IDEs). Excellent examples are the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and the Microsoft DSL Toolkit. These tools are gaining in popularity as they become integral parts of their respective IDEs (Eclipse and Visual Studio).;The Utah Modeling Framework (referred to from here on out as UTMF) is one such approach. UTMF takes full advantage of modern language features in .NET and Java 5 that allow annotations to be added to source code. These annotations are preserved when the code is compiled, and can be accessed via reflection. These annotations also have the advantage of being structured, so that each annotation can have various properties linked to it. These annotations can be considered as a means to adding metadata to code.;UTMF also provides a greatly simplified notion of what a modeling language is and what metamodels mean. Given the complexity of metamodeling in UML, this simplification is a valuable result for the modeling community as a whole, as it allows for simpler concepts and ideas to be used in communicating what models and modeling languages are.;However, the adoption of these technologies and frameworks is often hampered by the complexity of the tools and the difficulty in creating an effective domain specific model up-front. Also, the increase in more agile programming processes makes the formality of modeling languages harder for programming projects to adopt. This dissertation presents an approach that allows the aspects of modeling languages to be captured in a form that is much easier to adopt in software projects.