An Active Pattern Infrastructure for Domain-Specific Languages

Abstract

Tool support for design patterns is a critically important
area of computer-aided software engineering. With the proliferation
of Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), the adaptation of the
notion of design patterns appears to be a promising direction of
research. This paper introduces a new approach to DSML patterns,
namely, the Active Model Pattern infrastructure. In this framework,
not only the traditional insertion of predefined partial models is
supported, but interactive, localized design-time manipulation of
models. Optionally, the infrastructure can be adapted to handling
transactional tracing information as well as transactional undo and
redo operations. Possible realizations of the framework are also
discussed and compared