Unifying Modeling and Programming with Valkyrie
Published in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, MODELSWARD 2019, Prague, Czech Republic, February 20-22, 2019, 2019
Abstract
Raising the level of abstraction when developing a software system is the driving force behind Model-driven software development (MDSD) – a software engineering paradigm which gained more and more attention during the last decade. The current state of the art in MDSD allows software engineers to capture the static structure in a model, e.g., by using class diagrams provided by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and to generate source code from it. Furthermore, when it comes to expressing the behavior, i.e., method bodies, the UML offers a set of diagrams which may be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, not all UML diagrams come with a precisely defined execution semantics and thus, code generation is hindered. Recently, the OMG issued the standard for an Action Language for Foundational UML (ALF) which allows for textual modeling of software system and which provides a precise execution semantics. In this paper, a tight integration between our UML-based CASE tool and our ALF tool is presented. The resulting tool chain allows to express structure and behavior of a software system on the model level and to generate fully executable Java source code.