The ‘Family Tree’ project we opened is empty: it
does not contain any models or method definitions—yet. It is all clean and
ready for us to implement our Family Tree modeling language. In order to do
this, we must enter the Family Tree metamodel into MetaEdit+. MetaEdit+ provides
two different approaches for this: graphical and form based metamodeling. When
adopting the first one, the metamodel is drawn with MetaEdit+ using graphical
GOPRR notation (as shown in
Figure 1-3)
and then loaded into the tool. For the latter one, MetaEdit+ provides tools for
creating and managing each metatype. While graphical metamodeling probably suits
better for beginner-level metamodelers and for documenting the metamodels, we
are still going to utilize form-based metamodeling tools while walking-through
this tutorial. This is because some advanced tasks at the latter part of the
tutorial require the use of form-based tools, and therefore it is preferable to
systematically work with the same set of tools throughout the whole
exercise.