Integrating Efficient Model Queries in State-of-the-Art EMF Tools

Model-driven development tools built on industry standard platforms, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), heavily use model queries in various use cases, such as model transformation, well-formedness constraint validation and domain-specific model execution. As these queries are executed rather frequently in interactive modeling applications, they have a significant impact on the runtime performance of the tool, and also on the end user experience. However, due to their complexity, they can also be time consuming to implement and optimize on a case-by-case basis. The aim of the EMF-

IncQuery

framework is to address these shortcomings by using declarative queries over EMF models and executing them effectively using a caching mechanism.

In the current paper, we present the new and significantly extended version of the EMF-

IncQuery

Framework, with new features and runtime extensions that speed up the development and testing of new queries by both IDE and API improvements.

We demonstrate how our high performance queries can be easily integrated with other EMF tools using an entirely new case study in which EMF-

IncQuery

is deeply integrated into the EMF modeling infrastructure to facilitate the incremental evaluation of derived EAttributes and EReferences.