Bidirectional Translation between OCL and JML for Round-Trip Engineering

Abstract

In recent years, Model-driven development (MDD) based techniques have emerged, and thus translation techniques such as translation from Object Constraint Language (OCL) to Java Modeling Language (JML) have gained much attention. We have been studying not only translation techniques from OCL to JML but also from JML to OCL in order to support Round-trip Engineering (RTE). Two directions of translation among OCL and JML are performed independently without considering unified and iterative translations in our previous work. For an OCL statement and another OCL statement which is obtained from a JML statement which was translated from the original OCL, our previous framework preserves only the meaning of the two statements, however, the forms of the OCL statements may change. It prevents us from RTE-based development. This paper proposes a translation technique between OCL and JML maintaining OCL code by describing their original forms in the comment area of the target languages. Our implementation has been evaluated on two projects used in our previous work and also seven additional open source projects.