Exploring How Model Oriented Programming Can Be Extended to the User Interface Level

Abstract

The purpose of our research is to explore the alternatives to extend well-defined UML to the user interface level. For the novice software modeler there is a gap between how the model looks and how the final product should look. The implications of some design decisions might not be easy to analyze without strategies like story boards, prototyping, etc. A cornerstone of our work is the use of the text-based modeling language Umple (UML Programming Language) and its metamodel as input. Umple has a similar syntax to Java, but is enhanced with additional modeling constructs. In this way our target was the creation of a code generator capable of interpreting a subset of the Umple language to produce complete working applications, by providing a translation into existing object-oriented programming languages. Using this generator, the software modeler can create working prototypes to help him to validate the correctness of the designed model.