Weaving executable models and code for software development

By: Hugo Richard, Eric Cariou, Jean-Philippe Babau

Abstract

One of the initial objectives of MDE is to obtain a complete software application from models through code generation. A standard such as fUML (Semantics of a Foundational Subset for Executable UML Models) enables to add abstract code on UML and DSL (Domain-Specific Language) models, allowing models to contain the entire definition of an application, from its architecture to its business algorithms. However, this approach raises the issue of the ability to reuse existing code written in a traditional programming language and of its adoption by software engineers. In this paper, we propose an intermediate vision where an application is composed of an executable model defining its behavior and traditional code defining its business operations. We propose a generic solution for weaving business operation signatures onto elements of an executable DSL (xDSL), allowing these operations to be executed automatically during model interpretation. We apply our solution to the implementation of a drone simulator software: a xDSL is used to define the simulation architecture model and the simulation functions are implemented in Java. We show that the approach facilitates the configuration and the setup of the simulator.

Keywords

xDSL, business code, software development, simulation

Cite as:

Hugo Richard, Eric Cariou, Jean-Philippe Babau, “Weaving executable models and code for software development”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 25, no. 3 ( 2026), pp. 3:29-42, doi:10.5381/jot.2026.25.3.a3.