An overview of the UGPRADE framework

In the different phases of the software life cycle a wide variety of documents is created. Many of these documents have a graphical representation with an arbitrary complex structure (like class diagrams, use cases, entity-relationship diagrams, etc.). CASE tools like Rational Rose or Together help developers to modify these documents, but often fail to check the consistency of different documents that are linked together. Therefore it is necessary to implement CASE tools which are more than just an intelligent graphic editor, CASE tools that check the consistency of different inter-related documents and the like. Constructing tools that meet these requirements is a tedious and error-prone task for at least two reasons:

Due to the graphical nature of most documents lots of work must be put in the realization of a graphical editor and an appropriate user interface.
Checking the dependencies between many complex documents requires carefully implemented data structures and operations on the them.

The first issue can be simplified by using a framework for graph editors like DV-Centro, GEF, etc. Unfortunately, these frameworks seldom help in solving the second issue. The complexity of the second issue can be significantly reduced by specifying the data structures and operations on them in a visual language. Since graphs are the most general data structure a visual language which allows the specification of operations on graphs seems to suitable. An example for such a language is PROGRES, which is used to program graph replacement systems.


With the UPGRADE framework it possible to address both issues at once. Documents are internally represented as graphs. These graphs are modified by operations specified in PROGRES at the moment. Support for other graph replacement systems will be implemented in the future, it will also be possible to code the operations on the graphs by hand. For the presentation of these documents an up to date user interface is used featuring not only graphical views on the documents, but also hierarchical or tabular views. Other views on documents can be implemented easily by using Java Beans components.


To reduce the amount of work required to build a new tool the UPGRADE framework not only provides a couple of basic views which can be used to present a document. It also contains the whole infrastructure required to modify these documents, display selected parts of them, and filter out unwanted contents. The representation of the document can be customized to ones needs in most cases must even implementing a single line of code.


At the moment prototypes for the following projects have been implemented using the UPGRADE framework:

Ahead
CHASID
E-Cares