On Sun, 27 Feb 2005, Wouter Zoons wrote:
This is all coming from someone with about a month of experience with MDAs, and as all novices do, I am ranting and ranting about the newer technology I am excited about. I think all of this can be done with the given infrastructure, it's all about running the MDA cartridge on a model to produce platform specific models and produce a second UMI file... I guess if this is what you want to do the first and most important step is how you want to express what is a platform independant model in UML.
[WZ> ] one second, you say "..and produce a second UML file.." .. I'm not so sure that (1) models need to be expressed in UML, and (2) you need to produce something on file
You're right about that... Models don't need to be expressed in UML/UMI, but if you're producing models that would probably be the best way to go about it since UML/UMI is standardized. The PSM would probably have to be tinkered with, especially early as this was coming out, as probably all the tags to make exactly what you want platform-specifically wouldn't be supported.
I'm not sure how familiar you are with UMT (another MDA that seems dead), but they were implementing a middle phase based on what they called UMI-lite, which served as their PSM.
I see your point, but I just wanted to draw attention to this. I have worked for a large company doing exactly this: generating PSMs from other PSMs, they were trying to achieve full tracability (aka round-trip engineering), besides the fact that I have my doubts about the feasibility I am pretty sure this is too complex and too much to maintain for something as a J2EE application (they were targetting system-engineering and logistical platforms).
AndroMDA in that respect has user-friendlyness in mind. Most users have difficulty modeling a few use-cases, so I would be reluctant to have them manage a PSM for each underlying technology they are using.
I'll address this when I respond Chad's email.
AndroMDA does generate a PSM instance per cartridge, which can be controlled by tagged values in the PIM (UML), but the PSMs are never written to file (we could do that though, we're just not doing it :-))
I guess the advantage to writing them to files has to do with tinkering with it before it goes to code. And there's no tinkering to be done if from a user's perpective if it's model->code as all the tinkering is done in the code itself.
I guess we took the interesting pieces of MDA, UML, XMI, FDJ (fun developing in Java) .. and glued them together.
and what you all came up with is quite cool.
-- Wouter
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