Compliance to the Model-Driven Architecture

The hot topic on the OMG mailing lists at the moment is what is required to brand a product as "MDA". The good news I guess is that the market are taking sufficient interest in MDA that vendors are desirous of branding their products accordingly. The bad news is that I suspect many of those vendors aren't really interested in MDA, simply in the rights to brand their products.

However, the issue of what makes a product "MDA" is a hot one with very little concensus. Here's my take.

I think the minimum requirement for a tool to be branded MDA would be its ability to participate in arbitrary MDA tool chains. This means that we must know what models are used as the input and output of the tool (or the sources and targets if you prefer) so you know if the tool can be meaningfully connected to other tools. And at the syntactic level, the input and outputs corresponding to those models must be interchangeable between the tools, mandating that XMI import/export (as applicable) must be available.

This does not imply that the only means of I/O is via XMI, simply that it is an option. There are many popular concrete syntaxes (e.g. SQL, IDL, UML diagrams etc) that are obvious candidates for alternative I/O forms. Indeed, having multiple forms of I/O is more or less essential for tools that anticipate interworking with existing non-MDA tools. For example your average Java compiler expects its input in Java syntax and not as XMI for the Java model.