MDA and the Eclipse Tools Project

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Quinton Wall's Blog | October 14, 2005   7:04 PM | Comments (0)

A lot of interest of late has been placed on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) Project of late but I wanted to highlight another project which I feel is beginning to get closer to realizing the goals of the Model Driven Architecture.

Maybe I should start with a brief discussion of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) as they are a few shades of what one may consider true MDA. According to the Object Management Group, MDA provides an "open, vendor neutral approach to the challenges of interoperability, building upon and leveraging the value of OMG's established modeling standards". Thats the official line but what it often boils down to is being able to model your code in UML or XMI and round trip engineer this into code.

The ability to synchronize between UML class diagrams is nothing new now with many vendors providing plugins to IDE such as Eclipse but where things are being taken to the next evolution is through sub projects of the Eclipse Tools Project wsuch as UML2 and EMF. These two subprojects are building upon the meta models for implementing true MDA architectures. Right now these projects are limited to XMI models which are not visually represented as what we would refer to as things like UML class diagrams but in the near future I am sure this support will be built in.

Why is this all important to how systems are engineered? In my opinion the paradigm shift will move from object orientated design through the likes of class diagrams to one based on Use Case diagrams. Its not that far a shift when you look at the power of projects such as the Andromda Project which "is an open source code generation framework that follows the MDA paradigm. It takes model(s) from CASE-tool(s) and generates fully deployable applications and other components". Basically what the andromda project allows you to do is take an exported UML diagram and generate a working application from it. Imagine when you EMF/UML2 enabled Eclipse platform can visually model your app then with a click of a button bring up a wizard which lets you select which type of application (WAR, EAR) and/or stereotype (Spring, EJB, Hibernate etc) you which to generate. Click ok and you are done. Then when you need to change something you tweak your model and you are off again. its not far off. All that is missing is some of the glue between projects.

Again, in a blog you can barely touch the surface of everything that MDA covers but I thought it was important to give such important projects as the EMF and UML2 a chance to shine too. My bet is that they will make a big difference to the way we code going forward.

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