A Special Guide-MDA and UML Tools
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Two years ago, the software trade press was awash in three simple letters—MDA. Short for "Model-Driven Architecture," MDA held the promise of developing sophisticated business processes exclusively through conceptual diagrams using UML, short for the Unified Modeling Language. Thrown into the mix were a few more three-letter ingredients, including CWM (Common Warehouse Metamodel), MOF (Meta Object Facility), OCL (Object Constraint Language) and XMI (XML Data Interchange)—all designed to transform UML into cross-platform, nonproprietary diagrams to code translations. This special guide to MDA tools compiles a spectrum of state-of-the-art MDA tools to assess the gulf between hype and reality.
Current State of MDA
For the uninitiated, MDA can be a challenge: The movement from models to code transformations demands implicit trust. MDA requires a complete paradigm shift, analogous to ASCII-based coders shifting from machine language to assembly or from procedural processing to object-oriented ways of thinking. For most developers, the journey starts with UML.
The Future of MDA
Almost all of the vendors included in this guide admitted that MDA's goal of seamless interoperability of model transformations hasn't been fully realized. This is partly due to standards that leave specific implementation details up to commercial vendors who must release their products into the market to fund future product development as the standards evolve. As the standards are put into real-world practice, additional needs and limitations are identified. and extensions or whole new categories are added to the standards family to address those concerns. Compuware's Director of Development Solutions' Edwin Schumacher states, "UML, MO and XMI are three of the five standards that are needed. There are two in proposal phase: QVT (Query View Transformation) and M2T (Model to Text). So those are the five standards that, in our opinion, would make up MDA."
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