Java on the Eclipse IDE is a frequent choice for software development nowadays. Software Engineering researchers have built program analysis tools in that environment for several purposes. However, that requires a deep understanding of Eclipse internals, such as the Java AST. This paper discusses the feasibility of a metamodel-driven approach to scaffold the construction of such tools. Its core is the Eclipse Java Metamodel (EJMM), obtained through reverse engineering. The latter is instantiated with meta-objects representing the constructs of a given Java program. We then use OCL to traverse programs very easily. To validate the feasibility of our metamodel-driven approach to program analysis, we developed an Eclipse plug-in based on it, to support the metamodel-driven measurement (M2DM) approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.