Shuttle: an Instant Model Synchronization Assistant for GMF Editors Based on Concept Synchronization

Abstract

Roundtrip engineering and refactoring are killer features of modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE) systems. Most implementations of these features nowadays, however, are tailor-made for scenarios like laying out Win32 GUI or diagramming UML and hence are hard to generalize; moreover, the refactoring is usually restricted to exact string matching and thus unable to synchronize artifacts with different occurrences of the equivalent term. These problems inhibit today's IDEs from supporting developments requiring synchronization across models, languages and documents. Shuttle is a novel instant modeling assistant developed by us running on Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) [1] editors. It monitors users' input model elements and link them by related concepts. Later modifications of an element will trigger rules to find the others under the same related concepts and result in various synchronization recommendations which developers may choose to enforce consistency among parts of the developed system. The link-trigger mechanism of Shuttle is based on what we call concept synchronization (CS), which is inspired by the idea of “concept” in ontology and “concept search” in information retrieval. CS captures the simple idea that model elements with related text descriptions would be very likely modified accordingly if one of them is changed by the developer. To detect all others related to a target model element, we establish a many-to-many mapping ahead of time between elements and WordNet Synsets [2] according to the element text descriptions and then, with WordNet’s help [3], all elements related to the target can be found by looking for those mapped to Synsets associated with the target.