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Pick a subject, and there will always be at least two points of view. When it comes to model-driven architecture (MDA), even experts can’t agree. The latest debate between two recognised software industry experts, Carl Zetie and David Frankel, discussed the differences between ‘pragmatic MDA’ and the Object Management Group’s MDA. But as you will see, either approach provides developers with the benefits of improved productivity, quality and better alignment with business goals.
Recently, Carl Zetie, vice president at Forrester Research published an article, ‘MDA is Development Oriented Architecture, Partly Thanks to Software Oriented Architecture (SOA)’, describing reasons contributing to the low adoption rate of MDA by corporate development teams. Forrester clients reported that MDA, as described by the Object Management Group, had shortcomings that include restrictive and dogmatic practices that stifle a development team’s productivity. He advocated a more pragmatic implementation of MDA principles that is more agile. He pointed out how “pragmatic MDA” implementations “incorporate useful modelling and some degree of code generation into the development process.” He stated tools like Compuware OptimalJ “represent the state of the art in sophisticated transformation and generation … of code and models.” That is, OptimalJ adds value to the development process because it delivers business value to the organisation.
The article raised the ire of David Frankel, Lead Standards Architect for SAP Labs, and author of ‘Model Driven Architecture: Applying MDA to Enterprise Computing’. Early on in the article, he cites that Compuware’s OptimalJ tool is “most truly compliant with MDA standards.” He cautioned calling an approach that “mixes automatic code generation and manual code writing pragmatic MDA, but not OMG MDA” was incorrect, and that MDA was far from impractical or dead as Zetie alluded. Frankel rebutted the notion that MDA is inherently waterfall in its approach, and went on to explain how the “MDA software development life cycle is iterative.” He cited several other experts that explain MDA leverages “what the industry has learned about component-based development.” He also describes the important role “that metadata management plays in MDA.” All of these formal definitions of MDA enable better software design and delivery, and are found in OptimalJ.
The point here is not to debate the merits of either Zetie's or Frankel’s arguments. In their descriptions of the best practice, they both used OptimalJ as the example of MDA implementations of either approach. It is possible to develop high-quality applications rapidly in a flexible and iterative fashion with MDA. As you are aware, OptimalJ developers are interested in results. That is the bottom line.
If you have not yet had the opportunity to download and use a copy of OptimalJ 4.1, I invite you to evaluate what Mike Riley, in his MDA product review published in Software Development magazine, calls “one of the best MDA tools for J2EE development on the market” and “Compuware’s masterpiece.”
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