Model-Driven Development of Distributed Systems in Umple

Abstract

Model-driven software development can help tackle complexity when developing large software systems. Model-driven development tools facilitate this. Such tools support multiple features and languages; some are multi-platform and support multi-language code generation from models. Umple is a full-featured open source language and modelling tool that we used as a basis for this thesis. Distribution concerns have become a critical part of modern software systems. In this thesis, we present how we extended Umple to support the development of model-driven synchronous or asynchronous distributed systems. Our contributions provide simple syntax, model analysis capabilities, and programming APIs, which allow users to change the configuration of systems both at development and deployment stages. We also demonstrate how a system can be modeled without distribution concerns and easily be transformed to a distributed system through our approach. The contributions of this thesis are: a) Creating a mechanism to distribute objects in Umple; b) Developing new semantics for modelling of distributed objects and providing supporting syntax for this in Umple; c) Investigating different patterns and technologies to implement code generation for distributed systems; d) Implementation, testing, and comparison of the distributed feature in Umple for executable Java code; and e) implementing a mechanism to dynamically modify the distribution plan at runtime.