Re: Ada and UML

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Matteo Bordin <matteo.bordin@gmail.com> writes:

> I personally think that scripting languages such as Acceleo (or xPand
> or similar) are ok just for very simple code generators because they
> cannot easily handle persistent datastructures. I cannot imagine
> writing a code generator for xUML or for synchronous languages in
> Acceleo...

I don't know Acceleo (clearly something to look at!), but from
experience with XSLT I'd say that it's much easier with model-to-model
transformations.

By that I mean, XSLT will easily translate XML to code if the structure
of the XML is a close match to that of the code. But if you omit (as I
did) the transformation from the structure that matches the UML tool's
needs to this more convenient structure, you end up doing a lot of work
in a language that's not well suited to it. For example, you wouldn't
want a state machine where the same event triggered more than one
transition from a given state. This and related checks took ~100 lines
of hairy XSLT in ColdFrame (http://coldframe.sourceforge.net/).