demos

Structure Builder (SB) from Tendril Software is an innovative tool for Java software development. In UML, program behaviour is expressed as object interaction diagrams. A key innovation of SB is that it allows the developer to generate Java code from these object interactions. This allows for quick and accurate code generation for significant parts of the program and it reduces the code for manipulation and navigation of data structures. A UML class diagram serves as the structural architecture which is used to derive the methods. A program is separated into object navigation and additional processing.

A collaboration is expressed in terms of a set of traversals which collect the participant objects of the collaboration. For example, if you have an object o and you need a subobject three levels down, you click the UML class diagram to define the path o.a.b.c and call get. This will make the object referred to by the path available. Any number of participant objects may be collected this way. Instead of calling "get" we could also call "execute" to call a designated method and return its result. A benefit of this approach is that the detailed Java code for carrying objects around is automatically generated by SB. Automatic object transportation is a general feature of SB.

Structure Builder is introducing two concepts: an object tracker model and a code fragment model. The object tracker keeps track of the objects which are available at a given point in a collaboration. A significant part of the programming task is ensuring that objects are transported to where they are needed in a program. Object tracker automates this task.

The code fragment model incorporates the following features: A code fragment takes several objects as input and produces several objects as output. A code fragment consists of a path, followed by an action name and associated properties. The kind of actions which can be called depends on the type of the object. All objects support the actions, execute, get and newMethod. Additional actions are defined for other types. For instance, the popular Java collection type, Vector, has the following additional actions: add, remove, find and iterate.

A collaboration is a sequence of code fragments. Each code fragment makes available output objects which may be used by code fragments later in the sequence. Each path in a code fragment may also contain extra code to be executed when the path is traversed.

The SB approach is general and powerful and facilitates the design and coding of Java programs. The strong reverse engineering capabilities of SB allow software developers to take their existing Java programs and continue development in a simplified way in SB style.

The demonstration will include:

1. Taking an existing Java program, reading it into SB and enhancing the program using the various capabilities of SB.
2. Developing a small Java program from scratch by entering a UML class diagram and using it to create methods.