Describing and Extending Classes with XMI: an Industrial Experience

This chapter reports on an industrial experience about the management and the evolution of classes in an automated way. Today’s software industries rely on software components that can be reused in different situations, in order to save time and reuse verified software. The object-oriented programming paradigm significantly supports component-oriented programming, by providing the class construct. Nevertheless, already-implemented components are often required to evolve toward new architectural paradigms. Our approach enables the description of classes via XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents, and allows the evolution of such classes via automated tools, which manipulate the XML documents in an appropriate way. To grant standard descriptions compliant with the UML (Unified Modeling Language) model, we exploit the XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) interchange format, which is a standard, defined by OMG (Object Management Group), that puts together XML, UML and MOF (Meta Object Facility).