In the next post I will talk about instancing the concepts we just have defined in concrete objects. Following this approach, the former is the metamodel, and the latter is the model.

Probably, the sample I provided “a town” is not good enough to imagine this in a software context, but we can replace it by a definition of the core concepts of UML (class, attribute, operation, association, …) and use them (by instantiation) in a second level. I will dive on it for sure.

On the other hand, and to satisfy your curiosity, Essential is built with .NET 3.5 and MGrammar. Not sure if this match with your preferred stack… But in anyway, if you like the language, it can be ported to Java using ANTLR.

Thanks for your feedback Ron!

I know it is all more or less relative, but your examples strike me as ‘modeling’ and not ‘meta-modeling’. Just like creating a UML class model is ‘modeling’… What’s your reason for the ‘meta’ bit…?

I’m curious as with what technology Essential is being build. Me, I’ve been doing more or less the same thing over the past months (going soooo slow ) out of necessity. I happily scrap my work and base it on Essential if it fits my tech stack of preference…

Nice work BTW!

\Ron