Avoiding the burden of programming a computer has long been a desire. Under the name “automatic programming,” many attempts have been made, but these attempts are much less ambitious than the name implies.

Here, we have the description of yet another attempt to avoid writing lines of programs in some higher-level language, by writing lines of specifications in some higher-level language, or rather in several different languages and notations. The fact that some of these lines are themselves generated from other lines, written in other languages, makes the situation more complicated.

It is extremely difficult to give a simple account of what this paper describes. In order to support model-driven engineering, the authors built ZOOM, that is, Z-based object-oriented modeling. This is a new formal notation based on the specification language Z, divided into three parts: ZOOM-M for the structural model, ZOOM-FSM for the behavioral model, and ZOOM-UIDL for the user interface (UI) model. But there is also ZOOM-E, an extension of ZOOM-M.

These notations are more or less automatically translated into others, then into others, leading to several so-called animations of the models, which seem to be some simple simulations of the user interface behavior in the presence of various events. The complete system seems to amount to some bloatware or hogware, made of a large collection of interconnected components. However, the given examples are not really convincing: the structural model example on page 33 is only a program part in some Java-like language, and the translation of a button schema on page 38 is simpler than the original text. The screen copies are either trivial or unreadable, and the proofreading of the paper is sloppy.

We learn on page 48 that “the communication mechanism is a predefined model integration framework that is the main focus of this paper.” I did not gather such an impression.