Modern software development processes include more or less comprehensive analysis and design phases where various models describing the static structure and the dynamics of a system are created. The primary motivation is to gain a deeper understanding (for discussions with developers and other stakeholders) and to provide documentation for the system. Starting from these models, the implementation is created. Unfortunately, these models are often not maintained during later phases of the project which leads to divergence of technical documentation and the final implementation, which furthermore impedes system maintenance.

Model Driven Development tries to bridge the gap between analysis/design and implementation by enriching the design artifacts (e.g. UML 2 models) to enable building parts of the application out of these models automatically. A recent initiative, called MDA (Model Driven Architecture), even has the ultimate goal to generate the whole application out of models. MDA proposes to differentiate between platform independent models (PIMs) which descibe the systems’ functionality independently of the underlying technical infrastructure. These models are then transformed by tools and transformation languages to platform specific models (PSMs), which include information about specific technology, e.g. Java/C# or MySQL/Oracle.

 

Click on the image to see the model and a screenshot of ActiveChartsIDE

In concretizing the idea of model-driven development, it becomes obvious that the graphical information on its own is not sufficient to properly describe the functionality of a system. Additional languages have been introduced to describe imperative parts of the software, but these mostly exotic languages are only seldom used. We also think that it is not feasible to solely rely on graphical abstractions, since models quickly become too complex to understand, leading to similar effects as it is the case with unreadable code.

Starting from these problems, our approach "ActiveCharts" to Model Driven Development combines models from the analysis/design phases and regular (handwritten) JAVA code from the implementation phase in a new way. We model the control flow of an application with UML 2 activity diagrams. Actions are realized in JAVA code which will be executed when the appropriate action is invoked. Analysis/Design artifacts are therefore seamlessly reused for implementation which leads to narrowing the gap between these phases, better documentation and therefore easier maintenance.

The new implementation of ActiveCharts will support both, interpretation of Behaviours as well as code generation for Behaviours.