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.