Home // SOFTENG 2016, The Second International Conference on Advances and Trends in Software Engineering // View article

Unifying Modeling and Programming with ALF

Authors:
Thomas Buchmann
Alexander Rimer

Keywords: model-driven development; behavioral modeling; textual concrete sytax; code generation

Abstract:
Model-driven software engineering has become more and more popular during the last decade. While modeling the static structure of a software system is almost state-of-the art nowadays, programming is still required to supply behavior, i.e., method bodies. Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams constitute the standard in structural modeling. Behavioral modeling, on the other hand, may be achieved graphically with a set of UML diagrams or with textual languages. Unfortunately, not all UML diagrams come with a precisely defined execution semantics and thus, code generation is hindered. In this paper, an implementation of the Action Language for Foundational UML (Alf) standard is presented, which allows for textual modeling of software systems. Alf is defined for a subset of UML for which a precise execution semantics is provided. The modeler is empowered to specify both the static structure as well as the behavior with the Alf editor. This helps to blur the boundaries between modeling and programming. Furthermore, an approach to generate executable Java code from Alf programs is presented, which is already designed particularly with regard to round-trip engineering between Alf models and Java source code.

Pages: 10 to 15

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016

Publication date: February 21, 2016

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8394

ISBN: 978-1-61208-458-9

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from February 21, 2016 to February 25, 2016