article · Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems · 2000

Some Shortcomings of OCL, the Object Constraint Language of UML

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Abstract

this paper is to expose some shortcomings of the Object Constraint Language #OCL#. We argue that, despite its numerous bene#ts, OCL is too implementation-oriented and therefore not well-suited for conceptual modelling. Moreover, it is at times unnecessarily verbose, yet far from natural language. In the past couple of years, we have designed a language, Alloy, that has similar motivations to OCL, while attempting to avoid some of these drawbacks. To illustrate the weaknesses of OCL, and some ways in whichitmay be improved, wehave translated most of the core package of the UML metamodel, together with its well-formedness constraints, into Alloy. Moreover, wehave shown that this subset of the UML metamodel is consistent, provided that this translation is valid, using Alloy's analysis tool, Alcoa. Section 2 describes the requirements of OCL and its shortcomings with respect to these requirements. Section 3 gives an overview of Alloy. Section 4 presents the translation of the UML metamodel into Alloy, and illustrates the issues raised in Section 2. Finally, Appendix A contains the complete translation of the metamodel classes into Alloy, and Appendix B the translation of the metamodel constraints. 2 Shortcomings of OCL The OCL manual #1# describes the requirements of OCL as follows: 1. OCL must be able to express extra #necessary# information on the models and other artifacts used in object-oriented development. 2. OCL must be a precise, unambiguous language that can easily be read and written by all practitioners of object technology and by their customers. This means that the language must be understood by people who are not mathematicians or computer scientists. 3. OCL must be a declarative language. Its expression can have no side-e#ects; that is, the state of a syste...

Cite this paper

APA 7

Vaziri, M., & Jackson, D. N. (2000). Some Shortcomings of OCL, the Object Constraint Language of UML. Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, 1, 555–562. https://doi.org/10.1109/tools.2000.10063

MLA 9

Vaziri, Mandana, and Daniel N. Jackson. “Some Shortcomings of OCL, the Object Constraint Language of UML.” Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, vol. 1, 2000, pp. 555–62, https://doi.org/10.1109/tools.2000.10063.

Chicago

Vaziri, Mandana, and Daniel N. Jackson. 2000. “Some Shortcomings of OCL, the Object Constraint Language of UML.” Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems 1: 555–62. https://doi.org/10.1109/tools.2000.10063.

Harvard

Vaziri, M. and Jackson, D.N. (2000) ‘Some Shortcomings of OCL, the Object Constraint Language of UML’, Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems, 1, pp. 555–562. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/tools.2000.10063.

BibTeX

@article{vaziri2000some,
  title = {{Some Shortcomings of OCL, the Object Constraint Language of UML}},
  author = {Vaziri, Mandana and Jackson, Daniel N.},
  journal = {Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems},
  volume = {1},
  pages = {555--562},
  year = {2000},
  doi = {10.1109/tools.2000.10063}
}

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