Classification of Concrete Textual Syntax Mapping Approaches

Textual concrete syntaxes for models are beneficial for many reasons. They foster usability and productivity because of their fast editing style, their usage of error markers, autocompletion and quick fixes. Furthermore, they can easily be integrated into existing tools such as diff/merge or information interchange through e-mail, wikis or blogs. Several frameworks and tools from different communities for creating concrete textual syntaxes for models emerged during recent years. However, these approaches failed to provide a solution in general. Open issues are incremental parsing and model updating as well as partial and federated views. To determine the capabilities of existing approaches, we provide a classification schema, apply it to these approaches, and identify their deficiencies.