Patent ID: 7681176

Claim:
A method of developing a graphical designer application to be used in developing graphical models using a graphical-modeling programming language, the method comprising acts of: (A) receiving a definition of graphical elements that can be employed by users of the graphical designer application to develop graphical models using the graphical designer application; and (B) receiving a definition of one or more object types that can be represented in graphical models developed, each object type being associated with a business domain model, a data domain model, a class domain model or a deployment domain model; (C) receiving a mapping between each of the graphical elements for which a definition is received in (A) and an object type for which a definition is received in (B); (D) generating, from at least the graphical elements definition, the object types definition and the mapping, source code defining at least a portion of the graphical designer application and one or more data files to be accessed by the graphical designer application during execution, the source code and one or more data files together defining the graphical designer application, ready for compilation and execution without further modification; (F) modifying functionality of the graphical designer application by modifying one or more of the definitions and re-generating the source code from the modified definitions; and (F) outputting the source code.