Promoting traits into model-driven development

Abstract

Traits are primitive units of code reuse that serve as building blocks of classes. In this research, we enhance reuse by extending the capabilities of traits; in particular, we add modeling abstractions to them.Traits have a variety of benefits, including facilitating reuse and separation of concerns. They have appeared in several programming languages, particularly derivatives of Smalltalk. However, there is still no support for traits that contain modeling abstractions, and no straightforward support for them in general-purpose programming languages. The latter is due to structural concerns that exist for them at runtime, especially traits that contain modeling abstractions.Model-driven technologies are making inroads into the development community, albeit slowly. Modeling abstractions such as state machines and associations provide new opportunities for reuse, and can be combined with inheritance for even greater reusability.However, issues with inheritance apply also when these new abstractions are inheritable units. This suggests that traits and models ought to be able to be synergistically combined.We perform a comprehensive analysis of using modeling elements in traits. We implement such traits in Umple, which is a model-oriented programming language that permits embedding of programming concepts into models.The contributions of the thesis are: a) Adding new elements including state machines and associations into traits, hence bringing more reusability, modularity, and applications to traits; b) Developing an algorithm that allows reusing, extending, and composing state machines through traits; c) Extending traits with required interfaces so dependencies at the semantic level become part of their usage, rather than simple syntactic capture; d) Adding template parameters with associations in traits, offering new applications for traits in which it is possible to define design patterns and to have a library of most-used functionality; e) The implementation of all the above concepts, including generating code in multiple generalpurpose programming languages through automatic model transformation.iii

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“…We use Umple [1] [2] as the core tool in our method. Umple embeds constructs such as UML associations [3], UML state machines [4], traits [5], aspects and product-lines [6] in programming languages like Java and PHP. As a textual language it enables use of textual toolchains widely used in industry and open-source projects.…”

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