Maintaining Coherence Between Models With Distributed Rules: From Theory to Eclipse

Integrated Development Environments supporting software and model evolution have to deal with the problem of maintaining coherence between code and model despite changes which may occur on both sides. Rather than going through model reingeneering or code regeneration, it would be better to build a full correspondence between the starting models and keep it updated in an incremental way after each evolutionary step. In a series of previous papers, it was shown how distributed graph rewriting could support such updates. Here, we show how to construct a distributed graph from individual models, through the use of synchronized rules. In particular, we discuss the case of Java code and UML models, and propose an Eclipse implementation of the approach.