Umple-TL: A Model-Oriented, Dependency-Free Text Emission Tool

We describe the text-emission templating capabilities of Umple (Umple-TL) and compare this Umple feature to other technologies for text generation. Umple, which is written in itself, combines modeling synergistically with programming in languages like Java and C++. Umple-TL further builds on these synergies. With the use of Umple-TL, we eliminated dependencies on third-party libraries for text emission. We demonstrate how Umple-TL attains benefits such as smaller and faster executables, target-language independence and IDE independence. We compare Umple-TL and other text emission tools in order to show how Umple-TL can overcome many of the challenges a tool can face. The word ‘template’ in this paper refers to patterns for the generation of output, and not to generic types, another common use of the term.