iOCL: An Interactive Tool for Specifying, Validating and Evaluating OCL Constraints

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is frequently used to specify additional constraints on models, in addition, to the ones enforced by semantics of the models. It is a wellknown fact that due to the lack of familiarity with OCL, practitioners and even researcher to some extent are reluctant in using OCL. To help practitioners and researchers in writing OCL constraints for their specific problem at hand, we developed a tool called interactive OCL (iOCL) for interactively specifying constraints on a given model. The basic philosophy behind the tool is to present only those details (e.g., operations) of OCL to modelers that are valid at a given step of constraint specification process, in addition to helping modelers with its syntax. Our ultimate aim is to reduce the effort required to specify constraints, subsequently lowering down training cost and increasing the correctness of the constraints. iOCL is a web-based application that integrates other tools including Eclipse OCL for validation and evaluation of OCL constraints, and EsOCL for automatically generating valid instances of models that satisfy the specified constraints.