Enhancing UML Expressivity Towards Automatic Code Generation

Abstract

UML has turned out to be a great tool to exchange ideas among designers, from abstraction to detailed design. When it comes to machine interpretation, UML description lacks formalism, coverage and detail to produce a fully fleshed information system. Extensibility and genericity already built-in in the language can be exploited to cater for its deficiencies. UML diagrams can be refined and reengineered to cover unattended areas and missing information necessary for automatic system generation. GUI design, control logic and persistency can be tracked from robustness analysis diagrams down to generation of extended state, sequence, class and object diagrams. These diagrams are enhanced with new stereotypes and tags to enable machine generation of interchangeable UI paradigms, use case controllers and deployment of server entities. This enhanced UML concept is being tested in the development of a real large system using a customized set of scripts in a CASE tool.