Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 4, numbers 1 and 2, 2011 // View article

Compact and Efficient Modeling of GUI, Events and Behavior Using UML and Extended OCL

Authors:
Dong Liang
Bernd Steinbach

Keywords: OCL extension, action language, event handling, platform independent model, class diagram

Abstract:
The model driven architecture (MDA) allows to move the software development form the time consuming and error-prone level of writing program code to the next higher level of modeling. The MDA requires tools for modeling, transformation of models, and code generation. In the past, we have developed such tools successfully. Using these tools we recognized serious problems preparing concise, uniform, and complete models using the unified modeling language (UML). In detail these problems concern first the specification and parameterization of GUI elements, second the event handling, and third the modeling of the required behavior. In this paper we show efficient solutions for these problems using the object constraint language (OCL) together with the UML for modeling. While the parameterization of GUI elements can be solved with the OCL directly, the last two problems were solved by an extension of the OCL into an executable OCL, which we call XOCL. We show the benefits of all three new approaches by means of an example of a complete platform independent model (PIM).

Pages: 100 to 116

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2011. Used with permission.

Publication date: September 15, 2011

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628