Patent ID: 7840936

Claim:
A computer program product, tangibly embodied in an information storage device, the computer program product being operable to cause a data processing apparatus to: provide a visual modeling tool and modeling language entities being entities of a language for expressing applications designed in a visual modeling language environment of the visual modeling tool, wherein the modeling language entities have a corresponding syntactic description that is in accordance with the language; receive input defining an application in the visual modeling language environment using the visual modeling tool, the input defining the application as a selection of the modeling language entities and a configuration of properties of the selection to define the application; and generate a platform-independent model of the application based on the input and the modeling language entities, wherein the platform-independent model comprises the selection, the configuration, and a syntactic description of the modeling language entities in the selection, wherein the syntactic description describes a grammar of how the modeling language entities are to be interpreted; wherein including the syntactic description in the platform-independent model allows different platform specific runtime versions in different languages of the application to be generated by understanding the grammar of the syntactic description included in the platform-independent model to enable the modeling language entities to execute on different platforms.