[Uml-devel] codegenerators

[Andrew Sutton]

On Sunday 20 April 2003 9:18 pm, P. Fleury wrote:
> Brian Thomas wrote:
> >	I tend to agree with Sebastian on this. I've been investigating how
> >	some professional" UML diagramming tools deal with round trip
> >	issue. I can see two different approaches to roundtripping used,
>
> That is where we diverge: I was not talking round-tripping at all, just
> use Umbrello upstream, and not let it trash all the edits I have done in
> my code once generated. Luis has proposed something with diff3, which I
> think is the solution to this problem. This gives limited usability, but
> I think this is quite easy to implement, and is much more useful that
> the current code generation we have. Currently, once you have generated
> the code, and used it (meaning probably adapted it somehow), there is no
> way to go change something in Umbrello and have it be reflected in the
> code without doing this by hand, or letting umbrello stamp on your
> hand-edited parts. And that may prevent people from using it...

hmm... interesting solution. i think that the best way to provide rt support 
would be to ignore coding :) or make the user write all the code in umbrello. 
then we'd have direct control over everything.

> I think too that round-tripping is a hard problem, but the source of
> this is that the code analysis part has to deal with getting from
> low-level information (the source) to higher-level features. A state
> diagram or sequence diagram can be tricky to figure out automatically...

there's been a lot of work on code generation from sequence/state 
diagram/activity diagrams and the other way too.

just thought i'd throw this out: uml 1.5 (published in march) incorporates a 
new set of features: formal action semantics. these are the objects that 
would have direct correspondence to code. the action semantics (as far as i 
can tell) provide some kind of AST modeling - like really generic code 
structures and actions.

i think we should give alot of thought on how to build round-trip stuff into 
u2. so, if anybody has any really good ideas. write them down. i'd love to 
hear them.

andy