Parsing and Printing Java 7-15 by Extending an Existing Metamodel

Many technologies and frameworks are built upon the open source Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) to provide model-based software development or even model-based consistency preservation of software artifacts. In this context, not only EMF-based modeling of the source code but also parsing of the source code and printing the model again into source code files are required. The Java Model Parser and Printer (JaMoPP) provides an EMF-based environment for modeling, parsing and printing Java source code. However, it supports just the syntax of Java 5 and 6. Moreover, JaMoPP is based on some technologies that have technical problems and have not been further maintained. In this work, we extend the metamodel of JaMoPP to support Java versions 7-15. Our extensions expand the metamodel with new features, for instance, the diamond operator, lambda expressions, or modules. Moreover, we implemented our new parser and printer. The parser implementation is based on the Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) that is well maintained, which reduces the maintenance effort to extend our JaMoPP for new versions of Java.