One notable benefit of model-driven development that is often underrated is improved reuse. This is a direct consequence of appropriate separation of concerns promoted by this development approach. The more intertwined concerns are when addressed in a piece of code, the harder it is to reuse that piece of code. The reason is simple: whenever you tie a solution for one concern to a solution for another concern, you are in trouble: you cannot reuse that piece of code where only one of the concerns is relevant, or the solution for one of the concerns is not appropriate (even if the solution for the other concern is).

Model-driven development promotes an approach where problem-domain concerns are addressed separately from implementation concerns. That means artifacts dealing with problem-domain concerns are free from any specifics on target platforms, and also that artifacts addressing implementation-related concerns are totally unaware of any problem domain knowledge.

That is fantastic, and the reason is twofold:

1. it makes it viable to build a repository of platform-independent problem-domain specific components, likely created by people that are experts in their domain, that can be reused on different target platforms;
2. it allows implementation specialists to code their technology-specific implementation strategies as standalone artifacts (i.e. templates), which can then be shared and reused in applications for the most varied problem domains.

The software industry has been looking for a long time for a way of encapsulating knowledge about specific problem domains in the form of platform-independent software components. Model-driven development with true executable models enables that dream.

For many decades, valuable business logic has been imprisoned into obsolescence-prone implementation-specific artifacts. We are working hard on a product that will help stop this insanity and finally make the dream of truly reusable component repositories a reality.

One key aspect of MDA is platform independence. However, even some of the brightest people in our industry misunderstand what platform independence means in MDA.

Platform independence has a different meaning in MDA than it has, for instance, in Java. Java promotes platform-independence by providing a common environment that insulates the application from platform details such as the instruction set and system API (for instance, for memory allocation, file system manipulation, networking, GUI, threading, etc). The application still has to address all these concerns, but it does that through API and mechanisms that work the same way regardless the actual underlying platform, and thus can run on any platform the Java environment is available. In other words, the Java environment is the platform.

MDA promotes platform-independence by adopting a design-centric approach. Models are removed from implementation related concerns and thus are inherently platform independent: a single design can be reused for building the same system for multiple target platforms. The implementation details are taken care of by target platform specific templates. The templates are applied to the user models then generating concrete platform-specific artifacts (running code, documentation, database schema, configuration files). Differently from Java (even if Martin Fowler says so), MDA does not promote another platform. What it does is to promote a clear separation between problem domain concerns and implementation concerns (as covered before here in the inaugural series entitled “Where we are coming from“).

The benefits of this separation are many: from unprecedented levels of reuse to better opportunities for work specialization. I plan to cover these benefits in detail on future posts.

RC

On his bliki, Martin Fowler eloquently describes the three different modes in which UML can be used: UML as sketch, UML as blueprint and UML as programming language. Let’s revisit the different modes from the perspective of tools for the job.

UML as sketch

Description: In this mode, UML is essentially a tool for conceiving and communicating ideas between team members. As such, there is no need for completeness or validity of the object models, and actually any information not essential for communicating the idea at hand is intentionally omitted for conciseness and clarity. UML as sketch is increasingly popular, even at shops where model-driven development is considered an abomination.

Tools for the job: developers don’t need special tools for using UML as a sketching tool, paper and pen or a whiteboard are great. The only flaws are when you would like to archive a drawing or send it to others by email. In that case, Visio (or any other generic diagram editor) is a common choice. Another less known option is Whiteboard Photo, that allows you to take a snapshot of your hand drawings (on a whiteboard or on paper) and have them automatically translated into great looking clean 2-D charts.

UML as blueprint

Description: in this mode, the focus is on having UML models used as an input to the implementation phase, and thus need to be valid and complete from the point of view of structure. Behavioral aspects are described in textual form (such as in use case descriptions) or by means of diagrams depicting scenarios (such as sequence or collaboration diagrams) and are inherently informally and incompletely described. The models can be submitted as input to code generation but the generated code has to be enhanced by hand to cover the behavioral aspects.

Tools for the job: generic tools won’t cut it here - you will need diagram editing tools that support all (or most) of UML diagrams, and (if you are taking the code generation route) persist your models in a format that your code generation tools can understand. Most UML tools out there support (or intend to support) this.

The TextUML Toolkit we provide supports this mode too. Your class diagrams are fully verified, and are persisted using a standard format.

UML as programming language

Description: In this mode, UML models must be complete both structurally and behaviorally as they must be simulatable and serve as input to code generation (by the way, Fowler really misses the point when he argues that a graphical language such as UML is not appropriate for fine grained behavior specification - who said UML is graphical anyway?).

Tools for the job: there are only a few tools currently in the market that support this mode, they tend to target embedded software development, and I bet you will not find how much they cost on their websites unless you call them.

Corcova Libra will support this, and when made available will visibly sport a reasonably fair price on our web site. Also, Libra will aim at mainstream business application developers, instead of focusing on specific vertical markets.

Conclusion

UML as sketch is cool and useful, but from the point of view of software engineering (our focus here) is meaningless.

UML as blueprint is increasingly practiced in shops where (partial) code generation has been adopted. It has benefits over writing the entire code by hand, but it still requires all the interesting code to be written manually, and there are a lot of issues with that.

Finally, UML as programming language (in other words, full blown model-driven development) is the most interesting of the three modes, even if there is a lot of skepticism and misinformation towards it. I will talk about that in an upcoming post.

RC

Even though a textual notation such as TextUML is much more productive when creating UML models, the graphical notation is still better for a high-level overview. So, for the next milestone of the TextUML Toolkit, the main feature planned is a model visualizer using the conventional graphical notation of UML.

The first option considered in implementing that feature was the UML2 Tools project, part of the Eclipse.org Model Development Tools project. UML2 Tools supports viewing and editing most of UML diagram types, and works seamlessly with models created using UML2 and EMF, which the TextUML Toolkit already uses, and that is great. However, it also requires GEF and GMF, what is bad because it significantly increases the download size for the TextUML Tookit (currently at 31MB), already high for the value it currently provides. Also, from some initial experimentation, it seems to be very computation and/or memory intensive. Because of that, it was decided a more lightweight alternative should be found, even more so if you consider interactivity and support for diagrams other than the class diagram are very low on our list.

Enter Graphviz and UMLGraph

Graphviz is an awesome tool for graph visualization. Graphviz takes simple text files (in the dot notation) describing the graph structure and produces great looking diagrams.

However, Graphviz is very generic, and does not know anything about the UML notation. That is when UMLGraph comes into play. UMLGraph produces dot files that generate OMG compliant UML diagrams (like the ones showing here).

So the direction is to adopt Graphviz and UMLGraph into a lightweight, non-interactive graphical viewer for UML class diagrams. We don’t dismiss having a more powerful graphical viewer (and editor) in the future, probably based on the UML2 Tools project, but the focus now is on simplicity.

There are two difficulties into adopting Graphviz and UMLGraph though:

1. Graphviz is a native standalone tool, not a Java API
2. UMLGraph, as a Java doclet, supports only one input representation: Java source with Javadoc comments

Turns out the first obstacle can be easily overcome by wrapping the Graphviz binaries into platform-specific fragments and providing a simple Java API on top of it.

The second obstacle is a bit trickier though. UMLGraph ties the usage of the doclet API into the generation of output in dot form. Breaking that coupling requires a non-trivial refactoring effort. I have been talking to UMLGraph author Diomidis Spinellis and he is keen on the decoupling, and that is the route we are going to take.

Would you like to see what it looks like? Make sure to check out the M2 milestone coming out in mid-June.

RC

It has been suggested that it is often the case that non-Java developers are not familiar with Eclipse-based products. Thus, we have made available to Windows users a single-click download option containing only the essential plug-ins from the basic Eclipse platform, EMF and UML2, plus the TextUML Toolkit itself. Check out the download page.

Users will still have to make sure they have Java 5 or later installed. The ZIP file has 31MB, so if you are familiar with Eclipse, we appreciate if you get the platform, EMF and UML2 from Eclipse.org to keep our hosting costs under control.

Thanks for the feedback, and keep the suggestions coming!

 RC

There hasn’t been a post here for a while, but there is a good reason for that: we are glad to announce that we now have an actual web site (go see for yourself) and have simultaneously made the first public release! TextUML Toolkit 1.0 M1 is the first milestone of the tool we have developed for creating UML models in a way that is more natural to hard-core developers. If you want to know more, go read the overview, download the tool and try out the tutorial.

After a long period of silence, I almost pity that I have somehow crammed too many great news on a single post…

RC