Lorini

Lorini birdYear: 2015

Part IV Project at the Faculty of Engineering. Created by me and Candice Eckert. Supervised by Jing Sun and Gill Dobbie.

Accepted for the 28th International Conference in Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering [doi:10.18293/SEKE2016-007], ranked in top 15 papers, and expanded version published in International Journal of Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering [doi:10.1142/S0218194016400131].

Introduction

Lorini is an educational tool to help introduce object-oriented programming and software modelling for the high school or early university level. The student makes UML diagrams, which are automatically converted to Java code in real-time. Clicking on a line of code will highlight the corresponding UML diagram component, and clicking on a UML diagram component will highlight the corresponding line of code, to help understand the link.

Dynamic feedback and a sample tutorial helps the user along the way. Once a full program is realised, it can be compiled and executed. The results (or compilation errors if any have arisen) are then displayed to the user.

Labelled screenshot of Lorini

Full details published in the SEKE2016 paper: Eckert, C., Cham, B., Sun, J., & Dobbie, G. (2016). From Design to Code: An Educational Approach. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, 443-448, doi: 10.18293/SEKE2016-007.

(if the link no longer works, feel free to contact me and I can send you a copy)

How to obtain and install

This plug-in is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

  1. Download and install Astah from here. Any version will suffice.
  2. Download Lorini here (73 KB).
  3. Close any open Astah windows.
  4. Open the installation folder in a file explorer. In Windows, this will be “C:\Program Files\astah-professional” or something similar.
  5. Navigate to the “plugins” folder.
  6. Copy Lorini-1.0.jar into this folder.
  7. Launch Astah.

How to use

Click here for a PDF tutorial.

Full evaluation results

To evaluate Lorini, we compared its features to thirty-five other automatic code generation tools. In the associated paper, only a small sample of the full table is shown to conserve space. The full comparison table can be accessed here.

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