[ajug-members] Just curious... MDA ?

[Eric Friedman]

At 11:00 AM 11/30/2007, you wrote:

>Message: 1
>Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:04:45 -0500
>From: "Rick Reumann" <rick.reumann at gmail.com>
>Subject: [ajug-members] Just curious... MDA ???
>To: AJUG <ajug-members at ajug.org>
>Message-ID:
>         <76ab01180711300704n17e860e3t4d670118aa2dfdee at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>I'm just curious what your guys thoughts are on Model Driven Architecture?
>
>At my current place of employment (very large company), this special
>"elitist" group (that I don't believe have ever coded in the trenches since
>maybe 1979) is pushing for everything to be MDA, MDA, MDA. They even want
>database schemas generated off of MDA tools. Personally I think that is an
>incredibly dumb approach (for a small app sure, but for large comapny
>databases to have them designed by how you view things in OO terms is not
>the best idea. Over time, apps will change, but the data will live on.)
>
>I also don't even get what these MDA tools give you? Ok so maybe it can
>auto-generate some code for you. That auto-generated code is never the
>difficult part of application development or even really the big time
>consumer. Maybe I'm just being too cynical, so I'd be curious on some of
>your thoughts.
>
>--
>Rick
>-------------- next part --------------

Rick,

My company is using MDA and is quite happy with it. I was a bit leery 
of it myself at first, but for us, it's worked quite well. My team 
wrote the code that does the code generation, but these guys live in 
the trenches. ;-) I was late to join the team so don't take much credit.

The code generation is the big thing, but it has been a real time 
saver. We use EJB3 and JPA. There is still a lot of cookie cutter 
code in my opinion, and for that, code generation is fine. YMMV. The 
other advantage is the UML itself for documentation.

We do not generate the database schemas, and I agree with you about 
the application changing but the data living on.

Eric