The architecture of a UML virtual machine

  • Authors:
  • Dirk Riehle;Steven Fraleigh;Dirk Bucka-Lassen;Nosa Omorogbe

  • Affiliations:
  • SKYVA International, One Cabot Road, Medford, MA, U.S.A.;SKYVA International, One Cabot Road, Medford, MA, U.S.A.;Object Oriented, Ltd., Kramgasse 5, 6004 Luzern, Switzerland;SKYVA International, One Cabot Road, Medford, MA, U.S.A.

  • Venue:
  • OOPSLA '01 Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Current software development tools let developers model a software system and generate program code from the models to run the system. However, generating code and installing a non-trivial system induces a time delay between changing the model and executing it that makes rapid model prototyping awkard if not impossible. This paper presents the architecture of a virtual machine for UML that interprets UML models without any intermediate code-generation step. The paper shows how to embed UML in a metalevel architecture so that a key property of model-based systems, the casual connection between models and model instances, is guaranteed. With this architecture, changes to a model have immediate effects on its execution, providing users with rapid feedback about the model's structure and behavior. This approach supports model innovation better than today's code-generation approaches.