MDA Part 1

MDA is trademark and sponsored by the Object Management Group and its consortium. OGM also trademarked many other model driven terms so that they could apply their strict standards to anyone adopting any part of their model. As far as I can understand Model Driven Architecture is code generation, (architecture generation) from a model built in one of the many available modeling languages. These models should be platform independent and by using MDA tools can be converted into any number of platform specific models which in turn with another mda tool will produce the actual application architecture defined in the model.

MDA is seen as a solution for many of the problems dealing with constantly changing development languages, platforms for applications to run on, and organizations tied to proprietary products because the learning curve is too high. Now a high level platform independent model is designed which is then translated into any number of platform specific models and then into the application, this enables the application designers to work free from the constraints and specifics of any particular language or platform.

In class we have learned plenty from the OlivaNova Model Execution suite, but there are many other vendors that produce tools, or packages of tools to be used in an MDA environment. Microsoft obviously cannot claim to be platform independent as they consistently refuse to develop on any platform than their own but they do provide tools called software factories that produce software based on a .NET DSL (domain specific language) produced from a platform independent model.