Introduction

The CORBA Component Model (CCM) specification defines a CCM metamodel ([1], chapter 8 ``Interface Repository Metamodel'') that can be used to represent the syntax of an IDL3 file.

The CCM Tools implement a CCM metamodel library that can be used to establish a CCM model in memory. The CCM metamodel library is very similar to the UML metamodel library from NovoSoft []. The library supports navigation between the different objects of the model as well as access methods to their attributes.

Figure 2.1: CCM metamodel library.

As shown in Figure 2.1, the CCM metamodel library can be used by a IDL3 parser to represent the syntax of IDL with a CCM model in memory. On the other side a code generator tool can use a CCM model to create code fragments.

Figure 2.1 actually describes the particular case where the IDL3 parser (see Chapter 3 reads IDL3 source code and generates a CCM model in memory, while the code generator uses the CCM model to generate IDL3 source code. If this parsing-generation task succeeds for all possible input IDL3 source code, then the CCM metamodel describes the IDL3 syntax exhaustively.