Building Domain-Specific Modelling Environments with Papyrus: An Experience Report

Domain-specific modelling with domain-specific languages (DSL) is rapidly gaining popularity in both research and industry for representing models of a target domain. However for a broader adoption, MDE tools need to provide adequate support for building these DSLs as well as for using the DSLs. We have been using the Papyrus modelling tool for domain-specific modelling. Papyrus implements the OMG UML 2 standard and uses the UML Profiling mechanism to model domain-specific notions. It has significantly evolved over the past years and is now considered to be industry ready. In this paper, we share our experiences on using the tool for domain-specific modelling. We base our work on the advanced customizability features for domain-specific modelling offered by Papyrus. However, we soon came to realize that creating a domain-specific modelling environment is a non-trivial task with Papyrus. We elaborate on the issues we encountered and on the steps taken to overcome them. As a possible solution for language engineers, we also developed a tool which can be used to automatically generate domain-specific modelling environments based on a given profile in Papyrus.