Integrating Textual and Graphical Modelling Languages

Graphical diagrams are the main modelling constructs offered by the popular modelling language UML. Because textual representations of models also have their benefits, we investigated the integration of textual and graphical modelling languages, by comparing two approaches. One approach uses grammarware and the other uses modelware. As a case study, we implemented two versions of a textual alternative for Activity Diagrams, which is an example of a surface language. This paper describes our surface language, the two approaches, and the two implementations that follow these approaches.