Cabot, Jordi

Clark, Tony

Clavel, Manuel

Gogolla, Martin

English

Electronic Communications of the EASST (European Association of Software Science and Technology)

Electronic Communications of the EASSTVolume 36 (2010)Proceedings of theWorkshop on OCL and Textual Modelling(OCL 2010)Preface3 pagesGuest Editors: Jordi Cabot, Tony Clark, Manuel Clavel, Martin GogollaManaging Editors: Tiziana Margaria, Julia Padberg, Gabriele TaentzerECEASST Home Page: http://www.easst.org/eceasst/ ISSN 1863-2122ECEASSTPrefaceThis contribution reports on the 10th OCL Workshop held at the MODELS conference in2010. The workshop’s motivation was to bring together researchers and practitioners in textualmodelling standards, such as OCL, to report advances in the field, to share results, to identifycommon areas and potential for integration, and to identify common tools for developing textualmodelling languages, with a view to advancing the state-of-the art. The workshop includedsessions with paper presentations and a final discussion session.Modelling started out with UML and its precursors as a graphical notation. However, graphicalnotations were found to have limitations in terms of specifying detailed aspects of a system de-sign and in terms of processing and managing models. Limitations in using graphical languagesinclude: specifying detailed behaviour; linking models to other traditional languages; makingmodels executable; model transformation; extensions to modelling languages; model manage-ment. Many of these limitations have been addressed in recent years by proposals for textualmodelling languages (e.g. there is a growing number of tools to textually define UML models )that either integrate with or replace graphical notations for modelling. Typical examples of suchlanguages are OCL, textual MOF, Epsilon, Alloy, etc.The current textual modelling landscape offers many interesting topics for research and exper-imentation including (but not limited to): new and/or successful applications; mappings to otherlanguages/formalisms; new algorithms; evaluation strategies and optimizations for validation,verification and testing, model transformation and code generation, metamodeling/DSLs, andquery and constraint specifications; alternative graphical/textual notations; evolution, transfor-mation and simplification of expressions; libraries, templates and patterns; complexity results,quality models and benchmarks for comparing and evaluating tools and algorithms; case studieson industrial applications; experience reports; empirical studies about the benefits and draw-backs; and innovative tools. The papers presented in the workshop covered many of the afore-mentioned topic of interests. All submitted papers were reviewed by three industrial or academicmembers from the Program Committee:• Michael Altenhofen, SAP, Germany;• Thomas Baar, Tech@Spree, Germany;• Mariano Belaunde, Orange Labs, France;• Achim Brucker, SAP, Germany;• Roberto Clariso´, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain;• Dan Chiorean, University of Cluj, Romania;• Joanna Chimiak-Opoka, University of Innsbruck, Austria;• Birgit Demuth, Technical University of Dresden, Germany;• Robert France, University of Fort Collins, USA;• Miguel Garcı´a, University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany;1 / 3 Volume 36 (2010)Preface• Geri Georg, Colorado State University, USA;• Heinrich Hussmann, University of Munich, Germany;• Alexander Knapp, University of Augsburg, Germany;• Tihamer Levendovszky, Vanderbilt University, USA;• Laurent Goubet, Obeo, France;• Richard Paige, University of York, UK;• Mark Richters, Astrium Space Transportation, Germany;• Shane Sendall, Snowie Research SA, Switzerland;• Pieter Van Gorp, University of Eindhoven;• Burkhart Wolff, LRI, University Paris-Sud, France; and• Steffen Zschaler, Lancaster University, UK.Two workshop papers were selected and were published in the additional LNCS volume ofthe MODELS 2010 conference: Integrating OCL and Textual Modelling Languages by FlorianHeidenreich, Jendrik Johannes, Mirko Seifert, Michael Thiele, Christian Wende and Claas Wilke,and A Specification-based Test Case Generation Method for UML/OCL by Achim D. Brucker,Matthias P. Krieger, Delphine Longuet and Burkhart Wolff.The workshop concluded with a discussion of features that the workshop participants wouldlike to see in a future version of OCL. The key points in the discussion were as follows:User Defined Parameterized Types OCL contains types such as Set(T ). However there is noway for the user to define such types which would be useful to capture polymorphic struc-tures.Functions OCL contains many features that are similar to functional languages such as MLand Scheme. Iterators involve processing that is traditionally performed by anonymousfunctions in FP; however iterators are limited in comparison. Adding anonymous functions(closures) to OCL would remove the limitations and make OCL much more expressive.Overloading Operators in OCL cannot be overloaded with respect to the type of the operands.Providing a mechanism for defining operator overloading and dynamic dispatch wouldmake OCL more expressive.Stereotypes OCL cannot access or define stereotypes in UML. Since stereotypes are part ofUML that needs to be constrained using OCL, this situation should be addressed.Implicit Collection Operations OCL inserts implicit asSet and collect operations whenmultiple links are traversed. The point was raised that this can cause confusion (as can thedifference between ‘−>’ and ‘.’) and makes tooling difficult. No consensus was reachedProc. OCL 2010 2 / 3ECEASSTon this, but the proposal was made to force the operations to be given explicitly or tointroduce different versions of these operations. It would help if tooling gave smart typingadvice as expressions were typed.Equality OCL provides a single equality operations whereas many languages provide both iden-tity and structural equivalence. These should be added to OCL.Reflection OCL should have better support for reflection. It should be able to reason about itsown meta-definition.Syntax OCL should have a concrete to abstraction syntax mapping.Types The standard definition of OCL should include a type construction algorithm.Frame Condition It is often the case that a specification needs to define a state change and alsorequire that everything else stays the same. Currently OCL requires all state in scope to beexplicitly referenced in a state change. It would be useful to have a frame condition suchas modifies only: and to leave all other state in scope unchanged.Tool Checking For OCL versions later than OCL 2.2, each chapter should be defined by a toolchecked model. It should be possible to have a clear separation between an OCL core withno casting and an upper-layer with appropriate syntax for casting. The specification shoulddefine a mapping from the upper layer to the lower layer, and tools must implement this.The workshop organizers are grateful to authors, participants, program committee members,and additional referees for their work and their contributions.Jordi Cabot, Tony Clark, Manuel Clavel, Martin GogollaMarch 20113 / 3 Volume 36 (2010)

Proceedings of the Workshop on OCL and Textual Modelling (OCL 2010)

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Proceedings of the Workshop on OCL and Textual Modelling (OCL 2010)

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Electronic Communications of the EASST (European Association of Software Science and Technology)