Earlier this week I was visiting the Programming Tools Group of Oege de Moor in Oxford. The visit was associated with the refactoring project in which I am an official collaborator. The project aims at studying the high-level description of refactorings. The starting point is to combine the strengths of program analysis with attribute grammars and program transformation with (strategic) rewriting based approaches. They are experimenting with the JastAdd-based Java compiler. For me the project is interesting as we are considering to integrate attribute grammars in Stratego. To start exploring this topic I’ve started writing an implementation of WebDSL in JastAdd together with Torbjörn Ekman, the main developer op JastAdd, who is a postdoc in Oxford. We got to implement a basic version of the data model sub-language complete with modules and code generation (using the StringTemplate library of Terence Parr). I’m planning to finish the implementation of the data model and use that as the basis for my lecture on JastAdd in the program transformation course. (And then hand the implementation to the students who can then add the implementation of (a subset of) the UI language.) We had further discussions about the relation of between JastAdd and Stratego; although quite different at first sight, there are interesting similarities (that I hadn’t realised before). More to follow about that in the future.