MDA: What's Real, What's Illusory, and What's in the Works

by Tom Welsh

Three years ago, OMG announced Model Driven Architecture (MDA) with some fanfare. "MDA-based standards," we were told, "enable organizations to integrate whatever they already have in place with whatever they build today ... and whatever they build tomorrow." Under the new dispensation, organizations would focus on distilling the pure essence of business logic, secure in the knowledge that it could be more or less automatically decanted into J2EE, CORBA, .NET, or whatever new software vessels might emerge in the future. Productivity and quality would rise; maintenance would consume less time, effort, and money; and IT would be more closely aligned with the business.