Summary

MDA is touted as a potential revolution of the software development process, claiming improved developer productivity, reduced development timeframes, and higher quality software. All of these points make MDA worthy of consideration for anyone undertaking a rapid development project.

MDA technology is still improving, and the dream of fully executable UML models is still unrealized. Despite this, the current crop of MDA tools are well suited to the development of new applications and the generation of prototypes, making MDA products ideal for incremental development processes.

Where MDA tools are less effective is when working with existing systems or legacy data. In this scenario, conventional modeling tools are likely to prove a more productive option.

Regardless of whether you consider MDA a viable technology for software development, the use of AndroMDA to leverage the power of model-based software generation makes it a valuable tool to add to the enterprise software engineer's repertoire, even if it is used purely for prototype generation.

The next chapter moves on to domain-specific languages and looks at how languages other than Java can be applied to the development of enterprise systems.

Additional Information

All of the OMG standards documents on MDA and its associated standards can be freely downloaded from the OMG Web site at http://www.omg.org. Current information on MDA is available from the same site at http://www.omg.org/mda.

The OMG also has a guide available to the MDA paradigm, at http://www.omg.org/docs/omg/03-06-01.pdf.

The AndroMDA team operates a mailing list for all discussions relating to the practice of MDA with AndroMDA. For help and advice on using AndroMDA, see http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=73047 or try the newer "Tiki" at http://team.andromda.org/tiki/tiki-index.php.