10.6 OMG OMA
10.6 OMG & OMA Nature hates a vacuum and will always seek to fill it. Just as in nature, the business environment hates a need and will form a committee to fill it. Despite reports that an elephant is a mouse built by committee, some committees actually do accomplish something useful. The need to share metadata within an information infrastructure has been addressed by the Object Management Group (OMG). The OMG is a software consortium established in 1989. It is the world's largest consortium, composed of more than 700 vendors , developers, and end users. The mission of the OMG is to promote the theory and practice of Object Technology for the development of distributed computing systems. For an Internet-enabled world, the OMG needed to develop a specification for distributed objects. This specification would define a standardized object-oriented architectural framework within which developers could create software. In keeping with the objectives of object orientation, the specification would need to address object reusability. The Internet establishes an environment in which many types of applications run on a variety of platforms. The OMG specification would therefore also be required to address portability issues. This same environment also requires that these various applications running on these many platforms interact with one another, requiring the specification to address object interoperability. Ultimately, the OMG defined the Object Management Architecture (OMA). The OMA is described in the Object Management Architecture Guide (OMAG) . This guide provides both the OMG Object Model and the OMA Reference Model . Every object in an object-oriented environment has attributes that are visible to the outside world. The OMG Object Model specifies an implementation-independent way of defining these attributes. The OMA Reference Model is just that: a model to which developers can refer to understand the components , interfaces, and protocols that make up the OMA. In order to complete the OMA, the OMG must provide detailed specifications for each object in the architecture. The specification of each object within the OMA is generated through a Request For Proposal (RFP) process. The process starts when a task force within an OMG Technology Committee generates an RFP. Responses to the RFP are evaluated for compliance with the OMA by this same task force. The task force recommends specifications to the Technology Committee, which votes to determine whether a specification should be recommended by the OMG board of directors for adoption. There is also a business committee that addresses the commercial viability of a particular specification. Based on this input, the OMG board of directors votes on the adoption of a specification on behalf of the overall OMG. The progress the OMG has made on OMA includes the Meta-Object Facility (MOF) that defines the meta-metamodel. I think we have gone a meta too far. Be that as it may, the MOF specifies the semantics to describe metamodels in a variety of domains. In addition to the MOF, the OMG has also defined an Object Analysis & Design (OA&D) Facility , which specifies the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a common metamodel. UML also provides a set of interfaces for the support of dynamic construction and traversal of user models.  |
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 113