An MDA Approach to Byte Code Level Cross-Compilation

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) offers a more efficient software  engineering process by raising the level of abstraction. Tool  support for the MDA is usually limited to generating code from UML  diagrams. Most MDA examples in scientific papers are limited to  relatively simple use cases that help the understanding of the MDA,  but are not suited to demonstrate the powers and flexibility of the  MDA. In this paper we show an MDA approach to cross-compile byte  code instructions from Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) to  Sun Microsystem's Java Virtual Machine (JVM). We introduce an  XML-based representation of byte code we call XMLVM. Based on XMLVM  we define XSL stylesheet transformations which can map certain  features from the CLR to the JVM.  Besides providing a specific  cross-compilation approach between the byte code of two different  virtual machines, we also show how XML technologies can be used  within the context of the MDA.