The design and implementation of a role model based language, EpsilonJ

In the social reality, objects communicate with each other by means of assuming roles to establish collaboration, and then can adaptively change their roles to obtain other interaction possibilities. To achieve the goal of supporting and realizing such object collaboration and adaptation in the object-oriented technology, especially in Java, a new adaptive role-based model Epsilon and a corresponding language EpsilonJ have been proposed. In this paper, we present the background of adaptive role-based models, and then focus on the design of this Epsilon model and its language. A program written in EpsilonJ must be translated into executable code to execute. We propose a translation scheme of mapping EpsilonJ syntax to the standard Java. With this translation scheme, we implemented a practical syntax translator as a preprocessor of EpsilonJ program, through lexical analysis and parsing. Evaluation shows that our translator can effectively perform transformation in high accuracy, and translated programs can be executed more efficiently than the existing implementation of EpsilonJ.