jjodel – A Reflective Cloud-Based Modeling Framework

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) relies on modeling frameworks that have proven scalable and successful. However, the accumulated technical debt has reduced effectiveness, among other quality factors. jjodel is a cloud-based, reflective modeling software that aims to reduce unnecessary complexity while enhancing usability. To make modeling frameworks more accessible for new users and students, jjodel eliminates the need for costly installation and maintenance (“zero-setup”). jjodel is reflective, meaning it can reason about its structure and behavior, mitigating the problems due to the generation, compilation, and deployment pattern that typically characterizes model-driven platforms. Thus, it is flexible and customizable and adapts to changing needs. Model editors are living components that naturally co-evolve to any change to the metamodel and related syntactical viewpoints (multiple concrete syntaxes). Cloud-based jjodel allows collaborative modeling, metamodeling, and syntax definition. Finally, jjodel allows layout-based syntax definition notations, which are needed in many engineering domains, such as railways.