research-article

Experiences from reengineering and modularizing a legacy software generator with a projectional language workbench

Authors:

Thorsten Berger,

Regina HebigAuthors Info & Claims

SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

Pages 346 - 353

https://doi.org/10.1145/2934466.2962733

Published: 16 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

We present a case study of migrating a legacy language infrastructure and its codebase to a projectional language workbench. Our subject is the generator tool ADS used for generating COBOL code for critical software systems. We decompose the ADS language into smaller sub-languages, which we implement as individual DSLs in the projectional language workbench JetBrains Meta Programming System (MPS). Our focus is on ADS' preprocessor sub-language, used to realize static variability by conditionally including or parameterizing target code. The modularization of ADS supports future extensions and tailoring the language infrastructure to the needs of individual customers. We re-implement the generation process of target code as chained model-to-model and model-to-text transformations. For migrating existing ADS code, we implement an importer relying on a parser in order to create a model in MPS. We validate the approach using an ADS codebase for handling car registrations in the Netherlands. Our case study shows the feasibility and benefits (e.g., language extensibility and modern editors) of the migration, but also smaller caveats (e.g., small syntax adaptations, the necessity of import tools, and providing training to developers). Our experiences are useful for practitioners attempting a similar migration of legacy generators to a projectional language workbench.

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Cited By

Barros DPeldszus SAssunção WBerger TSyriani ESahraoui H(2022)Editing support for software languagesProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3550355.3552452(232-243)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3550355.3552452
Berger TVölter MJensen HDangprasert TSiegmund JZimmermann TCleland-Huang JSu Z(2016)Efficiency of projectional editing: a controlled experimentProceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2950290.2950315(763-774)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2950290.2950315

Index Terms

Experiences from reengineering and modularizing a legacy software generator with a projectional language workbench
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Maintaining software
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Source code generation
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Extensible languages

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cover image ACM Other conferences

SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 2016

367 pages

ISBN:9781450340502

DOI:10.1145/2934466

General Chair:
Hong Mei
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies: Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education
DC Holdings: Digital China Holdings Limited

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 16 September 2016

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Research-article

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SPLC '16

Sponsor:

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies
DC Holdings

SPLC '16: The 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 16 - 23, 2016

Beijing, China

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Cited By

Barros DPeldszus SAssunção WBerger TSyriani ESahraoui H(2022)Editing support for software languagesProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3550355.3552452(232-243)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3550355.3552452
Berger TVölter MJensen HDangprasert TSiegmund JZimmermann TCleland-Huang JSu Z(2016)Efficiency of projectional editing: a controlled experimentProceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2950290.2950315(763-774)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2950290.2950315

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