Which Executable UML?

We want the best of both worlds for the application (business/science) logic and the software design.  The models should be articulate and detailed representations of platform independent requirements without prescribing any particular implementation.  The developers and/or model compiler should be free to choose the best platform specific technology and implementation.  The models shouldn’t make programming decisions, and the developers shouldn’t be sticking their noses in the application logic.

Even though miUML models may be used to generate Java or C++ code, those very same models may target other languages such as Go, Python, plpgsql, C, assembler or even hardware circuitry.  So the model elements of miUML do not necessarily mirror those of Java or any other particular programming language.  Instead, miUML provides a level of abstraction better suited to expressing application logic without specifying implementation. So don’t go looking for implementation features like private method or static class in miUML, because you won’t find them.

We do not fancy ourselves language innovators.  Rather, miUML is an effort to realize the execution semantics, language elements and development philosophies already described in the following resources as a set of metamodels and an API:

• Executable UML: A Foundation for Model Driven Architecture by Steve Mellor and Marc Balcer
• OOA 96: A paper written by Sally Shlaer and Neil Lang back in, you guessed it, 1996.
• Databases, Types and the Relational Model by C.J. Date and Hugh Darwen