What do you think of Model-driven Software Develop

Question

I'm really interested to hear what you think about Model-driven Software Development for Java and/or .NET.

Does it save time? Does it improve quality?

Answer 1

MDA is a bit of an overloaded concept. Sometimes it means turning UML or another type of diagrams in to executable code. I've never seen this work out well with the tools available nowadays. It usually causes projects to get results really fast and then cause a maintanance nightmare because the tools available don't really support big teams working on visual diagrams and because people start working in the diagrams as well as the generated code.

I've seen something that looked a lot like domain driven design being referred to as MDA, if you mean that I'm all for it :-)

Answer 2

MDA usually make difficult to integrate the business rules inside the server side layer, as the model view mapping is handled by generated code and functional hooks are provided as event responders.

Still I've not seen a MDA tool as powerful as Forté (or UDS, now dead) + Express were. I imagine that a MDA with the Forté capabilities plus better pattern to achieve an independent service layer (as ActiveRecord, or EntityTransactionManager patterns) would be a killer app for whatever platform.

The problem with actual application aiming at the three tiered MDA approach is that those are terribly difficult to set up and adapt to specific requirements. Just think of ABAP and SAP rates