Tool independent code generation for the UML: Closing the gap between proprietary models and the standardized UML model

Abstract

Embedded software development is moving towards the model-based paradigm to support the complexity of today's embedded systems, as they become more and more important and omnipresent in our daily lives. In this context, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a widely used standard. Code generators can be executed to generate source code from UML models. Usually the code generators are proprietary for one UML tool. If code generators for different targets or programming languages have to be supported by various modeling tools, the wheel must be reinvented. Code generators could use the standardized Extensible Markup Language Metadata Interchange (XMI) format of the UML as a basis. However, tools export their data to XMI differently. Therefore, the paper shows how the proprietary models of UML tools can be mapped to a standardized UML model. This is realized by using techniques for model to model transformations. These techniques need a meta-model for the source and the target model. Hence, an approach is introduced for creating meta-models for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of UML-tools, which act as a facade. Then the code generators can work with the standardized UML model to generate the source code. This results in an improved scalability of the code generators.