Components, Modules, Aspects or something new?
Introduce new Composition Techniques into your Language of Choice with Reuseware!
Reuseware Architecture
The Reuseware tools consist of a an SDK (CoMoGen) and a runtime (CoCoNut). The first can be applied to instantiate the second into a composition system for you language of choice.
CoMoGen: The Reuseware SDK
CoMoGen is a specific metamodeling or language development environment. It is not a tool for language developing in general, but for adding reuse and composition capabilities to a language.
CoMoGen builds on the Eclipse Modeling Framework and uses Ecore as a format for language specifications. Any other language development tool that understands Ecore can be used to define domain concepts, concrete syntax, tooling or other aspects of a language. An Ecore metamodel defined in other tools then acts as a base for your development in CoMoGen.
If you are working with grammar-based languages or a modeling languages with textual syntax, you should check out the Reusware offshoot EMFText. Reuseware also interacts perfectly with the Graphical Modelling Framework and other language development tools.
In CoMoGen, you model the extension to your language to achieve the desired component support. This is done using the Composition System Specification Language and Reuse Extension Language.
Any language, be it UML, Java or your very particular domain-specific language, can be handled and extended by CoMoGen without harming earlier developed tools for that language.
CoCoNut: The Reuseware Runtime
CoCoNut is the basic framework on which composition systems defined with CoMoGen run. It offers editors to define and debug composition programs, the explicit descriptions of compositions. A composition engine executes composition programs and can be applied as a pre-processor in a tool-chain or to generate views on a composed system.
CoCoNut extends EMF's resource management with a fragment resource management system that is aware of composition interfaces and can find fragments in global repositories.