First European Workshop on Behavior Modelling in Model Driven Architecture
Beginning of the week there was held the First European Workshop on Behavior Modelling in Model Driven Architecture [BM-MDA].
Why is it, that the structural aspects of software enjoys universality of modeling (UML) while the behavioral aspect does not (yet) and what can and should be done about it?
The same is – obviously – true for Web Service Descriptions. You will get a WSDL description which describes the syntactical aspect of the services, but the behavioral aspect is left undescribed.
The invited speaker was Prof. Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn about “Automatic generation of behavioral code – too ambitious or even unwanted?”
I am – as always – only giving my personal opinion here. I agree to the goal of behaviorable modelling. It was proposed, that preconditions and postconditions of operations should be used to do this. The advantage of the approach has been proposed to be able to become more specific step by step or level by level.
I mainly agree to the statement and I think it is pointing in the right direction. My personal opinion is, that preconditions alone are not enough, as long as they can contain every expression, because then they can not be linked with each other. Postconditions are in my opinion important, but they do not describe, how the state is changed by an operation. This is a difference to the ASM (Abstract State Machine) Approach, that was presented later and that I will discuss in another post.
Furthermore I think that code generation is the wrong way. The reason is, that code is too static to be extended later. A runtime model interpreter helps to avoid many problems, including extensibility and the deviations of models from the implemented reality. Furthermore in my personal opinion graph transformations should be avoided.
So this is my personal opinion about the first talk, which I think pointed into the right direction in general.
