Modeling and Automatic Code Generation Tool for Teaching Concurrent and Parallel Programming by Finite State Processes

Understanding concurrent and parallel programming can be a very hard task on first contact by students. This paper describes the development and experimental results of the FSP2JAVA tool. The proposed method starts from concurrent systems modeling through Finite State Processes (FSP). After that, the method includes an automatic code generation from the model. This goal is achieved by a domain-specific language compiler which translates from the FSP model to Java code. The FSP2JAVA tool is available for free download in the github site. We argue that this tool helps in teaching concurrent systems, since it abstracts all complex languages concern and encourages the student to be focused at the fundamental concepts of modeling and analysis.