Extending grammars and metamodels for reuse: the Reuseware approach

Abstract

The trend towards domain-specific languages leads to an ever-growing plethora of highly specialised languages. Developers of such languages focus on their specific domains rather than on the technical challenges of language design. The generic features of languages are rarely included in special-purpose languages. One very important feature is the ability to formulate partial programs in separate encapsulated entities, which can be composed into complete programs in a well-defined manner. A language-independent approach is presented that adds useful constructs for defining components. The authors discuss the underlying concepts and describe a composition environment and tool supporting these ideas–the Reuseware Composition Framework. To evaluate this approach, the authors enrich the (Semantic) Web query language Xcerpt with an additional useful reuse concept – modules.