Model-driven development tools built on industry standard platforms, such as the Eclipse
Modeling Framework (EMF), heavily use model queries in various use
cases, such as model transformation, well-formedness constraint validation and domain-specific
model execution.
As these queries are executed rather frequently in interactive modeling applications,
they have a significant impact on the runtime performance of the tool,
and also on the end user experience. However, due to their complexity, they can also
be time consuming to implement and optimize on a case-by-case basis. The
aim of the EMF-IncQuery framework is to address these shortcomings by using declarative
queries over EMF models and executing them effectively using a caching
mechanism. In the current paper, we present the new and significantly extended version
of the EMF-IncQuery Framework, with new features and runtime extensions
that speed up the development and testing of new queries by both IDE and API improvements.
We demonstrate how our high performance queries can be easily integrated with other
EMF tools using an entirely new case study in which EMF-IncQuery is deeply
integrated into the EMF modeling infrastructure to facilitate the incremental evaluation
of derived EAttributes and EReferences.
