Rational Endorses MDA

by Paul Harmon

I've written before about the Object Management Group's (OMG) Model Driven Architecture (MDA) initiative. In essence, the companies making up the OMG propose that application development should be done in UML and that code should be generated from UML models. In other words, using the MDA approach, a development team would focus on creating a platform-independent model (PIM) that defined the application. Then, one or more platform-specific models (PSMs) would be generated from the PIM. The PSM would be tailored for a specific implementation platform. Using standard UML profiles, the developers would then generate code from the PSM. It's easy to imagine, for example, that a company might create a new customer relationship management (CRM) application, and then generate PSMs for both .NET and for Enterprise JavaBeans and subsequently generate code for each deployment. If the MDA tools are properly designed, changes in the code can be recaptured by PSM models and fed back to the PIM model to ensure that the architecture remains current.

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Rational Endorses MDA 12 December 2001