Model driven architecture: Principles and practice

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is an approach to application modeling and generation that has received a lot of attention in recent months. Championed by the Object Management Group (OMG), many organizations are now looking at the ideas of MDA as a way to organize and manage their application solutions, tool vendors are explicitly referring to their capabilities in terms of MDA compliance, and the MDA lexicon of platform-specific and platform-independent models is now widely referenced in the industry. In spite of this interest and market support, there is little clear guidance on what MDA means, where we are in its evolution, what is possible with todays technology, and how to take advantage of it in practice. This paper addresses that need by providing an analysis of how modeling is used in industry today, the relevance of MDA to todays systems, a classification of MDA tooling support, and examples of its use. The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for how MDA can be successful in practice.