Hongzhi Liang, Jürgen Dingel. A Practical Evaluation of Using TXL for Model Transformation. In Dragan Gasevic, Ralf Lämmel, Eric {Van Wyk}, editors, Software Language Engineering, First International Conference, SLE 2008, Toulouse, France, September 29-30, 2008. Revised Selected Papers. Volume 5452 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 245-264, Springer, 2008. [doi]
As one of the MDA’s main principles, model transformation has led to the specification of QVT and a large number of model transformation tools. TXL is a generic source transformation tool that also possesses some very important model transformation properties, such as scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we consider TXL as a model transformation tool, especially, for model-to-model transformations. We first present an approach for applying TXL as a model transformation tool. An interesting feature of the approach is the automatic generation of TXL grammars from meta-models. Then, practical applications of model transformation via TXL that follow our approach are given. We conclude the paper with a preliminary evaluation of using TXL as a model transformation tool.