LANGUAGE INDEPENDENT METAMODELS FOR MODELLING OF OBJECT ORIENTED SOFTWARE

A language independent Meta Model supports the object oriented model on the basis of requirement. An environment for reengineering and reverse engineering should be extensible in three aspects. First the repository should be able to represent and manipulate entities other than the one directly extracted from source code. Second the reengineering environment should be able to operate with external tools like diagrammers, parser, and finally graphics drawing tools and to support reengineering in the context of software evolution. The environment should be able to handle several source code models simultaneously. The old system contains a large number of entities, so it should be scalable in terms of new system. The tools specific to the reengineering environment should support the programming languages like C++, Ada, Java and Smalltalk. A re-engineering effort is typically a cooperation of a group of specialized tools. Therefore, a reengineering environment needs to be able to integrate with external tools, either by exchanging information or ideally by supporting runtime integration. An additional requirement in this context is the actual performance of such an environment. It should be possible to handle a legacy system of any size without long latency times.