Book Description
Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is one of the most important technological developments affecting how enerprise-class information systems will be concieved, designed and built. Featuring the IBM MDA Manifesto, and the Cook-Guttman debate on the Microsoft and OMG approaches to model-driven systems. This book brings together some of the best minds to reflect on the role and value of MDA. In its pages you will find the essential discussions straight from the MDA masters: Oliver Sims, Stephen Mellor, David Frankel, Jorn Bettin, Steve Cook, Mike Rosen, Michael Guttman, Patrick Hayes, Elisa Kendall, Deborah McGuinness, Alan Brown, Bran Selic, Sridhar Iyengar, James Rumbaugh and Grady Booch.

From the Publisher
DAVID FRANKEL specializes in the architecture of distributed enterprise computing systems. He is the author of the book, Model-Driven Architecture: Applying MDA to Enterprise Computing. He served several terms as an elected member of OMG Architecture Board, and is the editor of MDA Journal. JOHN PARODI has more than twenty years experience in technical communication. He is an independent contractor focusing on the capture and articulation of technical ideas in support of engineering excellence and market success. MICHAEL GUTTMAN is currently Director of the OMG's MDA FastStart Program. He was previously CTO of Genesis. Michael helped develop several computing standards, including CORBA 1.0 and IIOP, and is the coauthor of two books and numerous articles. MIKE ROSEN has more than 25 years of experience in the modeling, architecture, and design of distributed systems. He was a contributing author of the OMG's COM/CORBA Interworking Specification and has written books about object technology and technology integration. STEVE COOK is a Software Architect in the Enterprise Frameworks and Tools group at Microsoft. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He has worked in the IT industry for almost 30 years, and has published a book and many papers and articles on software-related topics. JORN BETTIN, Managing Director of SoftMetaWare, is a software consultant with a special interest in techniques to optimize the productivity of software development teams and in designing large-scale component systems. GRADY BOOCH is an IBM Fellow and is recognized internationally for his innovative work on software architecture, software engineering, and modeling. He has been with IBM Rational as its Chief Scientist since Rational's founding, and is one of the original developers of UML. He is an author of six best-selling books. ALAN BROWN is an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for driving the technical strategy for the IBM Rational desktop products. He is a key part of the leadership team responsible for product strat-egy and architecture for the combined Rational and WebSphere tooling. SRIDHAR IYENGAR, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, leads technical strategy for IBM Rational on the use of models, metadata, and transformation frameworks. He led the definition of the initial MOF and XMI standards and their integration with UML. He serves on the OMG Architecture Board and Board of Directors. JAMES RUMBAUGH, an IBM Distinguished Engineer, is one of the original designers of UML. He is considered one of the founders of object-oriented modeling and is an author of five highly influential books on this and related topics. He is responsible for driving IBM's efforts in the areas of modeling databases and model transformations. BRAN SELIC is an IBM Distinguished Engineer who has been working on modeling language design and model-driven development methods since 1987. He pioneered the application of these methods in real-time and embedded systems and co-authored a book on this topic. He co-chairs the OMG task force responsible for finalizing the UML 2.0 standard. STEPHEN J. MELLOR is an internationally recognized pioneer in creating effective, engineering approaches to software development. He published the widely read Ward-Mellor trilogy for Real-Time Systems, and Executable UML and MDA Distilled. He is Chief Scientist of the Embedded Systems Division at Mentor Graphics, and chairs the IEEE Software Industrial Advisory Board. PATRICK HAYES received a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh. He has held academic positions at the University of Essex, the University of Illinois and the University of Rochester. He has been a visiting scholar at Universite de Geneve and Stanford, and has directed applied AI research at Xerox-PARC, SRI and Schlumberger. ELISA KENDALL, Chairman & CEO of Sandpiper Software, is the principal architect of Sandpiper's UML-based knowledge representation, ontology analysis and reasoning architecture. She leads the policy awareness segment of Raytheon's DARPA/XG program for next generation communications. DEBORAH MCGUINNESS, PhD, is the associate director and senior research scientist of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. She has built and deployed numerous ontology environments and applications, including some that have been in continuous use for over a decade at AT&T and Lucent. OLIVER SIMS is an internationally recognized leader in the architecture, design, and implementation of service-oriented enterprise systems. Oliver was a founder member of the OMG Architecture Board, and has contributed to the development of MDA and UML2. He is an author of several landmark books.

From the Inside Flap
In an industry that claims to completely reinvent itself every few years, revolution is the norm. Technology "churn" is the cost of con-stant progress; new languages, new paradigms, new network topolo-gies and new gadgets support the churn as well in business strategy: business process re-engineering, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, On Demand and the like all fall into this category. We are told that this constant progress is taking us nearer and nearer to Information Technology nirvana, that in our next rebirth I.T. Truth shall be apparent. Software development will be a job for mere children, no expertise will be necessary to maintain decades-old infrastructure, and integration will be a snap. Yea, and I say verily, the complex shall be laid simple! Would that it were. The more common effects of technology churn are of course constant retraining, maintenance nightmares caused by lost source code in languages no-one remembers, impossible integration projects to be delivered on improbable schedules, and billions of dollars of information technology budget wasted. The stories of lost productivity and pointless software modernization efforts far outnumber the long list of technologies that promised to revolu-tionize the design, delivery, testing, maintenance and integration of software systems. But was revolution ever achieved? One can point to improve-ments in fairly basic technologies. Though the Java I use to lay down system design today may not look all that different than the FORTRAN Backus gave us in the 1950’s, the parser that translates the Java is certainly more systematic, the compiler is likely not only faster but generates better optimizations, and the interpreter is far faster than an IBM 650. Not many of those improvements, however, can truly be called revolutionary. While the World Wide Web delivered us a standardized user interface for a wide variety of information and applications available on a network, it isn’t in structure too different than the Gopher, X Windows, or even IBM 3270 terminal networks that preceded it. In fact, essentially all of the "revolutionary" technology upheavals in the I.T. field have truly been evolutionary. They built on, abstracted or extended existing communications paradigms or algorithms. This isn’t a bad thing of course; it means that a system designer or software developer can leverage at least an existing abstraction in his work when he encounters the "next best thing" on the job. Sure, the C++ syntax for printing is bizarre, but printing is printing, and the FORTRAN developer’s FORMAT abstraction isn’t going to hold one back too long from learning C++. As you’ll see in the discussion, the tit-for-tat and the tête-à-tête and the to-and-fro in this volume, Model Driven Architecture (MDA) changes the landscape in some very important ways. Most obviously, most modeling languages (and in particular the Unified Modeling Language) are graphical rather than textual. With a fifty-year history of nearly all textual languages for directing computing engines, this is a departure, but not really a huge one. Formal graphi-cal languages have been used in the computing industry since the beginning, and more than a few of us remember "flow charts." More importantly, the model transformation that is the heart and soul of MDA is in many ways no different than any other compilation technique. The idea of converting, or transforming, one descrip-tion of an algorithm into another (usually less-abstract) description of an algorithm goes back at least to our old friend FORTRAN, but really to the first assembler for EDSAC. The real difference in the MDA approach, other than the fact that the graphical language is "compiled" by an algorithm itself—a model transformer—is that model transformation itself is recognized as central to the design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance and integration of computing systems. This book contributes a conversation on points of view on MDA from these relatively early days of standardization of MDA practice. As this book appears, UML has swept the landscape, available in every open-source and commercial development environment, and according to several polls, in use or planned in use by at least 80% of corporate development shops. MDA, the natural extension of UML (which doesn’t wish to continue to be chained to the rock of pretty pictures), is spreading rapidly. That doesn’t mean that there is 100% agreement, however, on how the practice of system development and maintenance by model transformation should be followed. In these pages you will find the vital discussion of a young discipline by the developers, practitioners and theorists who are creating standards and products for this evolutionary revolution. While the basic ideas of compilation and even model transformation aren’t very new, the standards and many of the products and practices are, and it certainly helps to have as our guide someone who literally wrote the book on Model Driven Architecture, and who has been there since the beginning of that evolution. While this isn’t a reference manual or even a technology guide, it’s an important way to quickly understand the issues involved in implementing an MDA approach. I leave you in the hands of several masters of the craft. Enjoy your own evolution! Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D. Chairman and CEO Object Management Group, Inc. 40,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains

SYNOPSIS

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is one of the most important technological developments affecting how enterprise-class information systems will be concieved, designed and built. Featuring the IBM MDA Manifesto, and the Cook-Guttman debate on the Microsoft and OMG approaches to model-driven systems. This book brings together some of the best minds to reflect on the role and value of MDA. In its pages you will find the essential discussions straight from the MDA masters: Oliver Sims, Stephen Mellor, David Frankel, Jorn Bettin, Steve Cook, Mike Rosen, Michael Guttman, Patrick Hayes, Elisa Kendall, Deborah McGuinness, Alan Brown, Bran Selic, Sridhar Iyengar, James Rumbaugh and Grady Booch.

ACCREDITATION