Generating methods signatures from transition state diagram: A model transformation approach

In software engineering the UML (Object Management Group (OMG), 2004) is nowadays the lingua franca for object-oriented modeling. Development of systems with such modeling language is based principally on models as abstractions of real-world and/or thought concepts where different kinds of models represent different views on a system. During systems development such models are enriched with additional information and are thus transformed from more abstract into more concrete ones. While object oriented models traditionally served as blueprints for manual systems implementation, the model driven architecture initiative of the OMG (OMG, 2003) promotes the usage of models throughout the entire development process. Starting from a so-called Computation Independent Model (CIM), different kinds of transformations lead to Platform Specific Models (PSMs). These PSMs can be used later to generate code for a specific platform. This paper presents a code generation approach by model transformation taking as source models: the Domain Class Diagram (DCD) and Transition's State Diagram (TSD) and instead of generating directly plain text for the chosen platform, an intermediate structural model for the Java platform is generated. Such intermediate model will enable its extensibility with new features. The core idea of this article is code generation by model transformation from transition State diagram for system's complex classes. The generated code contains full details for the class (attributes) and full methods signatures.