JAction: A High-Level Surface Syntax for UML Action Semantics

Generating executables from UML is possible given a precisely defined language for describing actions, a so-called action language. The UML specification formally describes the semantics that an action language must conform to, but not the syntax. Until recently, several surface syntax languages for UML have been proposed. These language, however, suffer from a number of limitations. First, they map to UML action semantics in a one to one fashion, cluttering the language with unnecessary constructs. Second, they introduce new syntactic constructs that are unfamiliar to most programmers. Finally, they require the creation of compiler from scratch, instead of leverage existing technologies. In this paper, we present a fully compliant UML action language, called JAction, which aims to overcome the limitations of existing languages. JAction is based on Java syntax, which can enable its adoption. It has also been designed to abstract out many UML actions into high-level constructs.