An important feature of any product is the ability to integrate with other tools. Any single tool cannot hope to cover the entire system lifecycle adequately, and users will always have a requirement to use a tailored set of tools to support their development process.
With this in mind the iUML suite provides a powerful set of features that enable users to achieve such integration. In addition, the toolset provides a number of off-the-shelf integrations.
Integration Features
The central core of the iUML Suite is iUML Modeller and Simulator. This allows the users to interactively construct, debug and test executable UML models prior to code generation and these models are held in one or more repositories.
There are a number of tool facilities that support integration with the Modeller and Simulator tools and access to the contents of model repositories:
- Repository API. This "C" language API allows programs to both read and write every aspect of the information contained in an iUML repository. This allows users to develop their own tools that, for example, import proprietary information into iUML repositories or extend the capabilities of the tool itself. The API accesses the repository through the same transaction mechanisms as the modeller tool and so full multiuser access to the repository by external programs is supported.
- iCCG. Although primarily designed to support the generation of code from iUML models, iCCG provides access to the entire iUML repository contents (in the same way as the "C" API). It therefore allows users to extract information from the repository for any purpose whatsoever, and does so through the mechanism of xUML itself. This means that not only is it very quick and easy to create a suitable extractor, but the power of xUML modelling can be used to perform sophisticated processing on the information during the process.
- "Offline" Tools. Packaged with iUML Modeller are a number of non-interactive tools (programs) that perform utility operations on iUML repositories. For example, there are a series of tools that support various configuration management related operations such as extracting a component from a repository or inserting a component into a repository. Since these tools are non-interactive, they can be called from user-written scripts (written in any scripting language). Such scripts can then, of course, access other systems and tools such as configuration management systems. Users can employ such scripts to streamline interaction between the iUML development environment and CM systems.
- Customised Menus. The modeller tool provides the ability for users to add menu operations to the tool. These operations can invoke suitable scripts which can then call API programs or offline tools. When invoked, information about the repository and the model item on which the menu was invoked are passes to the scripts enabling users to extend the Modeller tool with operations that perform actions on the selected model items.
Another important area for integration is in generated code. It is obviously essential that such code correctly integrates with the chosen deployment environment and Kennedy Carter recognises that there are many more target environments than just Microsoft Windows and the Java VM.
For this reason, all of Kennedy Carter's code generators are available in an "Adaptable" variant with which users can change any aspect of the generated code in order to integrate with target systems. Further, not only do these code generators generate code but, typically, also generate "make" files to ease compilation and building. With the adaptable versions of the generators, users are able to change this in order to generate suitable project files for their chosen IDE.
Off-the-shelf Integrations
Using these features Kennedy Carter has created a number of off-the-shelf integrations with other products. Here is a list of some of them:
- DOORS Interface. This interface allows textual requirements and traceability information to be exchanged backwards and forwards between iUML and the DOORS requirements management toolset;
- XMI Model Interchange. This allows user to export xUML models in the OMG standard XMI format and thus import the models into other XMI compliant modelling tools;
- GNAT Programming Studio. The TA-9 SPARK Ada 95 code generator, not only produces Ada code but also generates the necessary project files to allow the user to build and debug the generated code using the GNAT Programming Studio tool.