My Final Project

Today I had a presentation-exam about my project. I talked about my progress and my future work. It went pretty good, but I didn't get a grade yet. It is expected in a week or so.

To summarize:
My project is about code generation from UML statecharts. Using Java and XSLT, I take the XMI that represents the statecharts, and generate a QHSM state machine in Java/C.

Confused? Sorry. I'll try to explain:

• Statecharts are a graphical representation of complex systems. They are based on finite state automata, but extend (and complicate) them greatly.
• UML is the Unified Modeling Language. It is a graphical language that allows software developers to describe their software designs in a visual way. Statecharts are a part of UML. There's a FAQ about UML here.
  
• XSLT is a language for transforming XML into other text, including other XML. Here's a tutorial.
  
• XMI (the XML Metadata Interchange) is a representation of UML data (and some other metadata) in XML format.
• QHSM is "Quantum Hierarchical State Machine", which is Miro Samek's implementation of a state machine (a state machine is an executable statechart). It is described in his book.

If I'm not clear enough - please post a question as a comment below, and I'll elaborate on the topic of your choice.

For implementing both Java and C code generation, I use something like Martin Fowler's Two Step View pattern (I was actually told that there exists such a pattern right after I suggested my approach, which I though to be original) - first, I create an XML pseudo-code state machine. Then I take this XML and turn it to either a Java or a C state machine.

It was fun, and I learn a lot, especially on XSLT and XML. I have more things to do for this project. Among them:

• Implement the C code generator - at the moment I only have a Java code generator, because that's the main priority of the company for which I develop the software.
• Build some king of testing tool, that can take events from a script file and fire them at a running machine.