Combining Models with Code: A Tale of Two Languages

In the pure model-driven view of software engineering, models are the sole artifacts to be created and maintained and executable source code is entirely generated from the models. However, due to the variety of modern platforms and the complexity of capturing them correctly in models, this vision has not yet been fully realized. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows combining high-level models with low-level code into an executable system. The approach is based on two modeling languages, one presenting a common abstraction of modeling and programming languages, and the other allowing to express the bridge between the model and code. We illustrate our approach using a running example of an invoicing system for which the business logic requirements are captured by an executable model and the requirements on the graphical user interface are directly mocked up using a GUI designer tool that generates Java code.