Section B.8. Why Bother with Profiles?

B.8. Why Bother with Profiles?

The real power of a profile comes when it is used by many people interested in that platform or domain. Not only does it introduce a common vocabulary, but also it allows you to leverage tools that generate source code and other artifacts based on the profile. For example, a tool could convert a model that uses our Web Service profile into a deployable web service. Such a tool could generate the implementation class and populate a deployment descriptor file with the service type and encoding values, keeping the model and code in sync. As another example, the Omondo Eclipse IDE plugin provides a J2EE profile which, when applied to your model, allows automatic generation of the medley of classes required to implement an EJB (prior to EJB 3.0) and even deploys them to the application server.

The OMG maintains some common profiles, such as profiles for CORBA and testing. The testing profile, for example, describes mappings to JUnita widely-used Java unit testing framework.