MDA Radar

Issue #5 [March 20-March 27, 2006]

MDA Tools Evaluation - Part IV: Investigating Model Transformation Tools, Model Repository Tools & Model Generation Tools

Last week’s edition of MDA Radar evaluated Model-in-Action and XMF Mosaic. In the final installment of the MDA tool evaluation series, JAX Magazine author Soumen Chatterjee investigates different model transformation tools, model repository tools and model generation tools.

Model Transformation Tools

Model transformation tools are investigated with reference to the OMG specification, and tabulated in Table 1.



From the table above, it is evident there is a lot of fantastic collective intelligence that is on its way to revolutionaries the model transformation idea. Especially GMT is very promising in this regard. We will run another installment about GMT in Q2/Q3.

Model Generation Framework

Model Generation Frameworks are another important area within MDA. These frameworks facilitate the generation of standard MDA tools as per the MDA spec. Table 2 briefly brings up a few interesting innovations in this context.



All of these MDA frameworks look very promising, useful, and ready to make an MDA impact in the industry. These tools raise a genuine question about building a common service oriented enterprise architecture bus (EAB) (Please refer http://jaxmag.com/itr/online_artikel/psecom,id,790,nodeid,147.html), which will help provide collective intelligence towards MDA benefits, besides adding great value to several enterprises. We will discuss this as part of the MDA trend topic that will appear in future editions of the MDA Radar.

Model Repository

Another important feature of the MDA specification is the model repository, which is highly recommended to realize the persistence advantages of the models. Moreover model repositories developed with the standard facilitates the portability of these models across tools and platforms. Table 3 shows two model repositories.



UML Tools

Across the industry more than 80% of the tool vendors and industry thought leaders have mistakenly (!) considered UML tools as MDA tools, which in turn has mislead organizations. No one denies the fact that UML is used in MDA, but there are so many other features required to brand a tool as an “MDA tool”. For this, we need to understand the real benefits of MDA in addition to simple models. An UML tool definitely facilitates model development, but the tricky part is that most of them are not reusable across the tool. In this section we are not reinventing the UML tool comparison wheel. People who are interested in getting a fantastic UML tool comparison matrix, please be advised to follow this link: http://www.umlderby.org/ For UML support in embedding environment please refer http://www.uml-embedded.com/

Conclusion

This week we have finished our first round of investigations around the Model Transformation Tools, Model Repositories and Model Generation Framework. The MDA Radar will revisit the evaluation/investigation stage again as and when it detects any major update signals from either the tool vendors or the community. Now the time has come to derive some useful matrix and a roadmap to provide some available choices. Stay tuned for next week. It is strongly recommended that you watch the movie “Escape from Alcatraz” (1979 movie), before lapping up next week’s content. It will give you some idea about the tool selection in real life. Right! You get it. Watch the movie. Have a wonderful week ahead!

References