A multitude of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) have
been implemented with XML Schemas. While such DSLs
are well adopted and flexible, they miss modern DSL editor
functionality. Moreover, since XML is primarily designed as
a machine-processible format, artifacts defined with XMLbased
DSLs lack comprehensibility and, therefore, maintainability.
In order to tackle these shortcomings, we propose
a bridge between the XML Schema Definition (XSD) language
and text-based metamodeling languages. This bridge
exploits existing seams between the technical spaces XMLware,
modelware, and grammarware as well as closes identified
gaps. The resulting approach is able to generate Xtextbased
editors from XSDs providing powerful editor functionality,
customization options for the textual concrete syntax
style, and round-trip transformations enabling the exchange
of data between the involved technical spaces.
We evaluate our approach by a case study on TOSCA,
which is an XML-based standard for defining Cloud deployments.
The results show that our approach enables bridging
XMLware with modelware and grammarware in several
ways going beyond existing approaches and allows the automated
generation of editors that are at least equivalent to
editors manually built for XML-based languages.European Commission ICT Policy Support Programme 31785
