Handcrafting a Triple Graph Transformation System to Realize Round-trip Engineering Between UML Class Models and Java Source Code
Published in Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2016) - Volume 2: ICSOFT-PT, Lisbon, Portugal, July 24 - 26, 2016, 2016
Abstract
Model transformations are a mandatory requirement for model-driven development, a software engineering discipline, which has become more and more popular during the last decade. Over the years, the concept of unidirectional model transformations and corresponding tool support reached maturity since these kind of transformations are widely used in model-driven engineering, mainly for forward engineering and code generation. In incremental and iterative software engineering processes, forward engineering may be too restrictive since it resembles waterfall-like processes. Thus, bidirectional transformations are required, which aim to provide support for (incrementally) transforming one or more source model to one or more target model and vice versa from only one transformation description. However, they seem to be rarely used in model-driven software development as adequate tool support is missing. On the other hand, programming languages nowadays provide support for higher-level features like closures or lambda expressions which allow to describe transformation patterns in a declarative way. In this paper, we present an approach for round-trip engineering between UML class models and Java source code, which is realized with a triple graph transformation system written in the Xtend programming language.