ParaTalk

Round Trip Solution for Paradigm Plus and VisualAge Smalltalk

ParaTalk is a round trip engineering tool, that provides forward and reverse engineering between Paradigm Plus and VisualAge Smalltalk. Paradigm Plus is a repository-based object-oriented CASE tool for analysis and design for large-scale software systems providing UML, OMT and others, as well as Business Process Reengineering strategies and data modeling. ParaTalk ensures consistency of design and implementation during all phases of the development process. ParaTalk is an integrated feature of the user interface of VisualAge for Smalltalk.

Forward Engineering

The object models created in Paradigm Plus packages contain all the information needed for code generation and complete support of the code structures provided by VisualAge Smalltalk.

ParaTalk supports the generation of classes, class/instance attributes and class/instance methods, as well as generalization hierarchies, associations, aggregations and accessor methods modeled in Paradigm Plus. Action elements and attributes of the public interface of a class are generated for support of the parts concept in VisualAge.

During the import process in VisualAge, Paradigm Plus packages are mapped to VisualAge applications which get automatically created, if they do not already exist. If the forward engineering process is incremental, it occurs that parts of the imported object model already exist in the specific Smalltalk repository. Therefore, an import collision mechanism is executed each time the import is carried out. It lets the user decide how to handle a collision by displaying the specific differences.

Reverse Engineering

There are two possible reasons to perform the reverse engineering process:

1. The user wants to bring an existing VisualAge project into Paradigm Plus
2. or he did make changes in the interface of the application (that could be changed classes, attributes or method definitions, associations, aggregations, generalizations etc.)

In the first case, the VisualAge information about classes, variables, methods and generalizations get populated into the Paradigm Plus Repository. In the second case the import collision mechanism of Paradigm Plus takes care of existing objects during import. All information of the object model are maintained.

Round Trip Engineering

ParaTalk supports the iterative software development process by the ability of ensuring the consistency of design and implementation at any time.

For more Information, please contact us at:

Computec GmbH Software Karlstr. 52-54 76133 Karlsruhe Germany Phone: ++49-721-98160-120 FAX: ++49-721-98160-129 E-mail: Regine.Jakobi@ctec-sw.com Web: http://www.ctec-sw.com