an entry from

Piotr's R&D blog

What a contrast to Erich's talk... The speaker is apparently a marketing guy serving a warmed-over business presentation with generous servings of rethoric and argument by assertion ("you know it's true!"). His argument boils down to: naughty developers don't follow the architectural models handed down from on-high, so we must automate the transformation from model to code (...and fire the programmers?). To be able to automate anything, machines must be able to understand the models, so clearly purely visual diagrams that only communicate to humans are inadequate. (This reminds me of the Web vs. Semantic Web debate: the web is only human-readable, while the semantic web makes all that information computer-understandable. Now, which one is wildly successful and which one can't seem to take off even with Tim Berner Lee's personal backing? One guess only!)

The speaker has finally gotten around to talking about MDA proper. It's the usual PIM to PSM to code flow chart, but at least he freely admits that the PSM will need lots of hand-tweaking to actually work. But then he goes right back and claims platform-independence, longevity, filling in pattern templates, etc. Blah. Interestingly, a guy from Motorola stood up and claimed that they're doing MDA successfully, precisely as presented. Gotta look into this to figure out what kinds of applications it's appropriate for.