Textual, Executable, Translatable UML

This paper advocates the application of language embedding for executable UML modeling. In particular, txtUML is presented, a Java API and library to build UML models using Java syntax, then run and debug them by reusing the Java runtime environment and existing debuggers. Models can be visualized using the Papyrus editor of the Eclipse Modeling Framework and compiled to implementation languages. The paper motivates this solution, gives an overview of the language API, visualization and model compilation. Finally, implementation details involving Java threads, reflection and AspectJ are presented.