EmPowerTec UML and modeling blog

Hello all,

we have released the new version 2.4.0 of Oclarity, our OCL authoring environment.

This release contains a couple of bug fixes in the parser and the OCL standard library.
In addition, we have updated the XMI Parser to support Enterprise Architect 9.1 and MagicDraw 17.0.

See this page for all changes. You can also read the manual to learn more.

Oclarity is free, so just try it, if you are interested in the Object Constraint Language.

If you have any problems or suggestions we would be happy to hear from you. Just send an email to support@empowertec.de.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, OCL, Object Constraint Language

Hello all,

we have released the new version 2.3.0 of Oclarity, our OCL authoring environment.

This release contains a couple of bug fixes in the parser and the OCL standard library.

See this page for all changes. You can also read the manual to learn more.

Oclarity is free, so just try it, if you are interested in the Object Constraint Language.

If you have any problems or suggestions we would be happy to hear from you. Just send an email to support@empowertec.de.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, OCL, Object Constraint Language

Hello all,

Jordi Cabot has listed the most popular articles in December 2010 on his site modeling-languages.com.

An article about EmPowerTecs UML Metamodel Viewer is on top of the list, that is, it was the most popular article in December 2010.

If you don’t know this site you should have a look at it. Jordi Cabot does a great job in continuously providing high quality content.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML Metamodel Viewer

Hello,

the Department of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen (a German university) conducts a survey about modeling and model driven development.

So, if you have worked in a model driven project or a project that makes use of modeling in some way please consider to participate. The more people answer, the more representative the results will be.

Best regards,
Andreas

Hello all,

we have released the new version 2.2.0 of Oclarity, our OCL authoring environment.

This release contains a couple of bug fixes in the parser and the OCL standard library. These bugs where found by evaluating the OCL expressions from Joanna Chimiak-Opokas and Birgit Demuths OCL course.
Thanks a lot to Joanna for making these expressions available to EmPowerTec for testing purposes, they where really helpful.

See this page for all changes. You can also read the manual to learn more.

Oclarity is free, so just try it, if you are interested in the Object Constraint Language.

If you have any problems or suggestions we would be happy to hear from you. Just send an email to support@empowertec.de.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, OCL, Object Constraint Language

Hello all,

we have released the new version 1.0.2 of our UML Metamodel Viewer.

This version uses the official OMG UML 2.3 cmof-files. The previous versions used an earlier, not yet finalized release of these files.

The UML Metamodel Viewer displays an Explorer-like view of the UML2 metamodel. It can also draw class diagrams in a semi automatic way. These diagrams give you a better understanding of a classes dependencies and interactions.

UML Metamodel Viewer with a diagram

You can:

• Create and customize diagrams by dragging and dropping classes from the Model Explorer on a diagram
• Organize diagrams in projects
• Scale diagrams
• Print diagrams

The UML Metamodel Viewer requires some third party software, that has to be installed on your computer as a prerequisite:

• The graphviz package
• A Java JDK
• The UmlGraph jar-file

The location of these files must be configured in the UML Metamodel Viewers option dialog.

You can read the manual to learn more.

It is free, so just try it out!

If you have any problems or suggestions we would be happy to hear from you. Just send an email to support@empowertec.de.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML, UML Metamodel

Hello all,

we have released the new version 2.1.0 of Oclarity, our OCL authoring environment.

Oclarity main window

This release brings more robust XMI imports for Enterprise Architect and MagicDraw XMI files. The XMI import was also updated to support the latest version of these tools (Enterprise Architect 8.0 and MagicDraw 16.9).

Also Oclarity now supports a configurable mapping of model types to OCL builtin types. For example, if a type in the model is called ‘int’, chances are, that it should be treated like the OCL builtin type ‘Integer’. For earlier versions of Oclarity ‘int’ and ‘Integer’ were always distinct types. Starting from version 2.1, ‘int’ and ‘Integer’ are treated the same. Oclarity comes with a list of default type mappings, which can easily be extended.

See this page for all changes. You can also read the manual to learn more.

Starting with this release we will no longer use the Postfix “XMI” for the XMI based version of Oclarity. That prefix was used when we introduced the XMI based version of Oclarity as a distinction to the original version of Oclarity which was designed as AddIn for Rational Rose ™. Since we do longer support Oclarity for Rational Rose and Rose is outphased by IBM Rational since years, this distinction seems unnecessary.

Oclarity is free, so just try it if you are interested in the Object Constraint Language.

If you have any problems or suggestions we would be happy to hear from you. Just send an email to support@empowertec.de.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, OCL, Object Constraint Language

Hello,

if you you need to use the UML2 Metamodel in some way for your work you will have noticed, that it is not easy to develop an understanding of the Metamodel, even less to learn quickly about the classes, their attributes and their relations to other classes. Basically there are only the official specifications from the OMG which are a bit dry to read.

Enter our new, free UML2  Metamodel Viewer!

The UML2 Metamodel Viewer is a standalone Windows application that can be used to browse the package structure of the UML2 Metamodel and explore the contained classes. In addition, it is possible to draw diagrams from these classes in a semi automatic way.

Here is a screenshot of the main window:

To create a diagram simply add a new diagram to your project and drag one or more classes from the Model Explorer to the diagram. For example, here is a diagram with the class Kernel::Classes::Class:

One of the neat features is that the related classes (superclasses and classes that are used in relations) are automatically added to the diagram. This is an easy way to see the “context” of a given class.

The installer comes with a manual that should get you started using the UML2 Metamodel Viewer.

There is a catch: currently UML2 Metamodel Viewer relies on some third party software (namely the Graphviz package and the UmlGraph package – the latter additionally requires a Java Development Kit) that must be installed and configured so that diagrams can be created.

This is a 1.0 release,  so you will surely find bugs using this software.  Please report bugs and feature suggestions to support@empowertec.de. We definitely appreciate your feedback! We plan to actively support this software, which means of course fixing bugs but also implementing new features depending on demand and effort.

The software is based on the cmof-files that define the UML2 Metamodel.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML, Metamodel, Diagrams

Hello,

we just released version Oclarity/XMI version 1.6.1.

This is a bug fix release. When releasing version 1.6.0 we did not realize that Sparx Systems had modified Enterprise Architects XMI export in such a way that it generated additional artifacts. In particular, after importing the XMI file, Oclarity/XMIs internal model contained additional associations (for examples superclasses where added as associations) and it contained some packages which are only used for Enterprise Architects internal use (’EA_*Types*Package’ packages). We did not notice the additional associations because they did not break our unit test – the additional elements did not create any problems when checking OCL expressions.

Finally, you might have noticed that attributes in the Model Explorer started with a number, e.g. 1. This was the internal representation of the members visibility. We have now corrected and extended this behavior so that the visibility is correctly displayed in the Model Explorer for all members.

Here is a list of all changes.

Oclarity/XMI is a free tool for checking OCL expressions against XMI files. If you have any problems, questions or suggestions about Oclarity/XMI please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, XMI, OCL

Hello,

we just released version Oclarity/XMI version 1.6.0.

This is mostly a bug fix release.

We updated the XMI reader so that it processes the XMI files written by the latest version of Enterprise Architect correctly and we improved the OCL parser and semantic checker.

Here is a list of all changes.

Oclarity/XMI is a free tool for checking OCL expressions against XMI files. If you have any problems, questions or suggestions about Oclarity/XMI please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, XMI, OCL

Hello,

we have just released Oclarity/XMI version 1.5.0. This version contains updated third party libraries and the time limitation of the previously released version is removed. There are no functional changes.

Oclarity/XMI is a free tool for checking OCL expressions against XMI files. If you have any problems or questions about Oclarity/XMI please do not hesitate to contact us.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Oclarity, XMI, OCL

Hello,

if you are interested in the Object Constraint Language OCL you will find a lot of interesting information in the the proceedings of the 8th OCL workshop:

There where 4 sessions in the workshop but the talks do not always fit fine to the session. I’d rather categorize the talks like this:

• Implementing OCL
• Applying OCL
• OCL tools

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: OCL, OC tools, Object Constraint Language

Hello,

the proceedings of the 3rd Workshop On Quality in Modeling are now available online.

They cover these talks:

Design of a Functional Size Measurement Procedure for a Model-Driven Software Development Method
Beatriz Marín, Nelly Condori-Fernández, and Oscar Pastor

A proactive process-driven approach in the quest for high quality UML models
Gianna Reggio, Egidio Astesiano, and Filippo Ricca

Description and Implementation of a Style Guide for UML
Mohammed Hindawi, Lionel Morel, Régis Aubry, Jean-Louis Sourrouille

A Combined Global-Analytical Quality Framework for Data Models
Jonathan Lemaitre, and Jean-Luc Hainaut

Empirical Validation of Measures for UML Class Diagrams: A Meta-Analysis Study
M. Esperanza Manso, José A. Cruz-Lemus, Marcela Genero, Mario Piattini

Towards a Tool-Supported Quality Model for Model-Driven Engineering
Parastoo Mohagheghi, Vegard Dehlen, Tor Neple

Have fun,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: model quality, modeling, DSL

Hello,

we are happy to announce the availability of Oclarity/XMI.

Similar to our OCL AddIn for Rational Rose Oclarity/XMI is a tool that is capable to perform extensive checks on OCL expressions, including type correctness.

In contrast to the Rose AddIn it is a standalone application that reads XMI files. Currently, XMI files from Enterprise Architect and MagicDraw are supported. If you would like to have support for other XMI formats then don’t hesitate and let us know.

From now on, we will use the term “Oclarity” for the standalone application.

Oclarity comes with a modern GUI that uses latest GUI standards like the Microsoft Ribbon to provide the best usability:

We appreciate each and any feedback. So if you have questions, feature suggestions or encounter bugs please let us know (send an email to info@empowertec.de or support@empowertec.de).

Oclarity is only available for Microsoft Windows platforms and requires and installation of the Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 or higher.

The manual can be downloaded separately. It contains some basic information on how to use Oclarity and also some screen shots.

You can download Oclarity for XMI here for free.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: OCL, XMI, Oclarity

Hello,

some time ago Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite has published some numbers from a survey on the usage of UML. There was only a relatively small number of participants but since it is so hard to learn about actual industry projects using the UML it is still an interesting read.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML

Hello,

on the puml mailinglist a call for papers for the Third international workshop on Quality in Modeling was issued. It is part of the MODELS ‘08 conference which takes place in Toulouse, France at 28 September – 3 October.

From the announcement:

The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners interested in the emerging issues of quality in the context of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Discussions will take a large place and could address issues such as early quality control based on models at a high abstraction level, building prediction models for software quality based on model metrics, relationship between model quality and software product quality, quality control, etc. Submissions related to ongoing industrial projects aiming to increase quality are encouraged.

It’s surely an interesting workshop.

Proceedings of the first and second workshop can be found here and here.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: model quality

Hello,

Jason Gorman from parlezuml.com made a comment on a posting that stated that the UML has failed and is no longer relevant. Basically Jason says that some of the authors arguments are correct but others are not and that – all in all – “UML is alive and well”.

The comments on the original posting are mostly affirmative, but there are also some comments in the defense of the UML.

I’d like to add another thought: the companies and organizations that use the UML more rigorous (and thus possibly discover its benefits) are usually large companies and organizations, often in the military sector or working on embedded software. Project workers in these types of organizations usually have neither the time nor the interest to hang out in the internet and read blogs and write comments. Therefore I think that the sum of all public statements does not accurately reflect the actual acceptance and appreciation of the UML in the software industry.

In addition, the UML is also used to capture requirements in analysis models, something that can’t be done in code.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML, modeling

Hello,

Juha-Pekka Tolvanen of MetaCase has published a call for papers for the 8th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling.

It takes place October 19-20, 2008 in Nashville, USA.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: DSM, OOPSLA

Hello,

XMI is a (in fact it’s not, but that is actually the mess) standard defined by the OMG for the exchange of models between tools.

Steven Kelly of MetaCase has written a blog posting concerning XMI. Basically, he claims that XMI is mostly unusable and its popularity is declining according to google.

The major causes for this unfortunate state of XMI are:

• The OMG hugely over engineered the XMI standard. The XMI specification is based on the MOF and thus introduced an additional level of abstraction.
• The OMG specified a couple of different versions, each requiring its own processing. The different version where driven by the associated UML versions.
• The OMG failed in providing a compliance test suite for XMI. Although they had plans to do this these plans where never realized.
• The vendors are also sometimes accused to actively try to “lock in” their customers to their own tool by making the XMI export proprietary. But on the other side this means that they cannot read XMI files from other tools thus losing possible customers. Personally I think that most vendors did not actively try to make their XMI format proprietary but that they just misinterpreted the XMI specification or that they did not want to spend the required effort to provide a fully compliant XMI format.

In practice, this means that a tool that wants to properly import XMI must write a dedicated importer for each supported other tool and for at least one of the XMI versions that are supported by the other tool.

In addition of being massively incompatible, the XMI files in itself are also often really freaky.

Lets look at an example in MagicDraw. Suppose we want to specify the type of an attribute as Boolean. The UML supports this as a builtin primitive type and thus one could assume that the representation in XMI should be straight forward. Not so with MagicDraw. If you open the dialog for the attribute type and click in the “type” field you are presented with the preselection “$OCL_boolean” and you could be tempted to use this suggestions, especially when you want to use the OCL:

If you resist this temptation and start to type “boo” MagicDraw offers these choices:

While the second choice is probably the better one, as a tool vendor you would have to support both forms since certainly some users would choose the first form.

Now let’s look how these different forms are represented in the XMI.

$OCL_Boolean:

<ownedAttribute xmi:type='uml:Property' xmi:id='_15_0_1_275013a_1210362988887_907256_342' name='underAge' visibility='public'>
<type xmi:type='uml:PrimitiveType'
href='UML_Standard_Profile.xml#_12_0EAPbeta_f720368_1161801304327_563815_114>
<xmi:Extension extender='MagicDraw UML 15.0' extenderID='MagicDraw UML 15.0>
<referenceExtension referentPath='UML Standard Profile::Validation Profile::OCL Library::$OCL_Boolean' referentType='PrimitiveType'/>
</xmi:Extension>
</type>
</ownedAttribute>

boolean from the MagicDraw profile:

<ownedAttribute xmi:type='uml:Property' xmi:id='_15_0_1_275013a_1210362988887_907256_342' name='underAge' visibility='public'>
<type xmi:type='uml:DataType' href='UML_Standard_Profile.xml#eee_1045467100323_191782_59'>
<xmi:Extension extender='MagicDraw UML 15.0' extenderID='MagicDraw UML 15.0'>
<referenceExtension referentPath='UML Standard Profile::MagicDraw Profile::datatypes::boolean' referentType='DataType'/>;
</xmi:Extension>
</type>
</ownedAttribute>

Boolean from the UML PrimitivTypes package:

<ownedAttribute xmi:type='uml:Property' xmi:id='_15_0_1_275013a_1210591343275_118710_1237' name='ended' visibility='public'>
<type xmi:type='uml:PrimitiveType' href='http://schema.omg.org/spec/UML/2.0/uml.xml#Boolean'>
<xmi:Extension extender='MagicDraw UML 15.0' extenderID='MagicDraw UML 15.0'>
<referenceExtension referentPath='UML Standard Profile::UML2 Metamodel::AuxiliaryConstructs::PrimitiveTypes::Boolean' referentType='PrimitiveType'/>
</xmi:Extension>
</type>
</ownedAttribute>

Now this is not a problem of XMI in itself but an incapability of the vendor to hide implementation details from the user. But it is typical for the problems that arise during processing XMI files.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML, XMI, MagicDraw

Hello,

if you would like to better understand the concept of UML profiles and their relation to the Object Constraint Language (OCL) I would recommend to read the nice paper OCL-based Validation of a Railway Domain Profile by Kirsten Berkenkötter.

Usually, OCL is propagated as a means to make UML models more precise, i.e. “better”, by adding information to the model that cannot be expressed with diagrams.

The usage of OCL in UML profiles is the other major application of the OCL. There it is used – along with stereotypes – to create a domain specific subset of the UML that is better suited for a given domain than just plain UML. Usually, a UML stereotype also defines a domain specific graphical presentation for the stereotyped element.

If you are familiar with the world of software modeling you are probably aware that currently two major schools of thought are contending for dominance. There are the proponents of Domain Specific Modeling Languages (DSL) who claim that a dedicated modeling language must be created for a specific application domain to allow effective modeling. And then there are the proponents of UML who claim that the UML provides a standardized, well defined and widely known modeling language which can of course be tailored to a specific domain (using profiles). Unfortunately, most of the people who make public statements concerning these contending approaches are biased, because they work for a tool vendor. For example, people working for IBM Rational will advocate the usage of UML, and people working for Metacase will propagate the DSL approach. Since this is a complicated topic I’m afraid that the only way to find an answer to the question “which is the best approach for my specific project?” is to make a careful evaluation and maybe a pilot project.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: UML, DSL, OCL