Java Roundtrip Engineering

When you develop a program, you have an UML model and source code. The purpouse of the model is to visualize structural relationships, interesting interactions and so on. The source code contains the implementation in a specific programming language and contains all the details required to execute the program. Neither of these are the master store of information, from which the other can be derived, but are two equally important components with different focus. The model and the source code share a lot of information that needs to be in sync, but it is both error prone and boring to have to update the same information in two places by hand. This problem is solved by JavaRE.

When you have modelled enough to start the implementation, you run UML2Java to generate the source skeleton. When working with the implementation, you probably add operations, classses and attributes. When finished, you run Java2UML to update the model with the new information and can go back and model some more. Run UML2Java again to update the source code with new things added to the model. Repeat the iteration until the program is finished.

Java2UML

Java2UML updates or generates an UML XMI model from Java source code.

Setup the CLASSPATH to point at java2uml, nsuml.jar, xml4j.jar, antlr.jar, the classes that you want to model and any libraries used by them. Then run

  java java2uml.Java2UML <model> <sourcepath>

To find out if an unknown class (not yet in the UML model) is an interface or a class, reflection is used. Therefore, all classes and interfaces that is used by the source must be incuded in the classpath. When the classes and interfaces have been included in the model once, they no longer need to be in the classpath.

UML2Java

UML2Java updates or generates Java source code from an UML XMI model.

Setup the CLASSPATH to point at uml2java, nsuml.jar, xml4j.jar and antlr.jar. Then run

  java uml2java.UML2Java <model> <sourcepath> {<class> | <package.*>}

Scope

JavaRE handles

• Packages
• Classes
• Interfaces
• Generalizations
• Abstractions<<Realize>>
• Operations
• Attributes
• Javadoc

• Method implementations
• Attribute initialization code
• Associations
• Import statements
• Exceptions
• Comments, excluding javadoc

Limitations

• JavaRE works best if only one class is defined in a source file. Inner classes are allowed.
• JavaRE works best if only one attribute is declared in a single statement.
• Operations with the same name have to be in the same order in the model and in the source code. (No parameter signatures are checked.)
• Only inner classes and interfaces are automatically removed from the model and the source.