Object-Process Methodology (OPM) vs. UML - a Code Generation Perspective

Modeling languages have been evolving at a high pace, encouraging the use of automatic code generators for transforming models to programs. Automatic code generators should enable mechanical and repetitive coding op- erations to be performed quickly, reliably and uniformly, yielding higher pro- ductivity and quality of the developed systems. One way to evaluate modeling languages is to examine their code generation capabilities. In this paper, we compare the code generated from Rhapsody by I-Logix, a leading UML CASE tool, to the code generated from OPCAT, an Object-Process Methodology (OPM) CASE tool. We found that UML consistency problems and its distrib- uted representation of system behavior are reflected in the code, yielding partial code that is mostly structure-oriented. OPM models, on the other hand, capture the static and dynamic aspects of a system in a single coherent view, enabling the generation of potentially complete application logic rather than just skeleton code. We explain and demonstrate the unique architecture and functionality of OPM-GCG—the generic code generator of OPCAT, which can handle dynamic repositories of translation rules from Object-Process Language, a constrained subset of English, to various target programming languages.