Abstract-The emergence of lightweight formal methods tools ing developers to model and verify their systems before engaging in hideous implementation details. However, an abstract Alloy specifi cation is far from an actual implementation, and manually task. This paper identifi es a subset of the Alloy language that is equivalent to a relational database schema with the most sion dependencies. This semantic correspondence enables both the automatic translation of Alloy specifi cations into relational database schemas and the reengineering of legacy databases into application layer to serve as interface to the underlying database. ing the software development process by making extensive automated models transformations. Formal methods (FM) can play a key role on MDSE, not only on the model verifi cation formations. However, they tend to be neglected in common costs involved. Alloy [1] is an increasingly popular modeling language that lightweight approach to formal methods [2]: a language based on simple mathematical concepts, sharing some resemblances the power of formal verifi cation to the average software engineer. Although Alloy is reaching a mature state as a modeling language, considerable work is still needed to unleash its full potential for MDSE. In particular, more theory and tool support is needed to help bridge the gap between specifi cations and implementations. In this paper we attempt precisely to establish the foundations of a framework to map between Java Application Alloy Specification seen in Figure 1 , the basic idea is to derive from the same specifi cation the following artifacts: A relational database schema where the data model will prescribed in the specifi cation should be enforced by the database schema in order to avoid integrity problems. cation, namely operations, will also be ported into this layer. In this paper we will mainly focus on the fi rst artifact, i.e, the connection between Alloy specifi cations and relational database schemas. tion II) and recalling a formal defi nition of database schemas sive power is similar to that of database schemas enriched reverse mappings between this Alloy subset and database respect to a database equivalence notion that ignores redundant not only migrating Alloy specifi cations to relational database implementations, but also reverse engineering abstract models mented prototype (Section VII). After presenting some related 978-0-7695-3870-9/09 $26.00
Along the same line, Cunha and Pacheco proposed an approach that translates a subset of Alloy into the corresponding relational database operations REF .
Mapping between Alloy Specifications and Database Implementations
2009 Seventh IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods
2009 Seventh IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods
Computer Science