What are the valid reasons for adopting a Model Driven Environment (MDE) ?
Model Driven Development, Model Driven Architectures (MDA) or Model Driven Environments (MDE) are concepts that are nowadays considered as highly interesting in IT literature. Even the OMG has embraced this scheme a few years ago and tries to laboriously define a MDE standard. Is this approach really interesting and are there good reasons to embrace it?
Nowadays the technological environments are changing very rapidly; Java/J2EE and .Net did not exist ten years ago. According to recent statistics many IT managers have not yet decided whether to stay in a traditional environment, be it the IBM mainframe or various Unix systems, or to migrate to a J2EE – Enterprise Java Beans or .Net approach. An important number of large companies consider the possibility of coexisting with two among the three or even the three above mentioned IT environments. It is obvious that changing from one system to another generally means that you frequently have to forget about an essential part of your past developments.
Being able to achieve a single development that is compatible with these various technological environments represents an interesting way to guarantee the long - term of the applications at a time, when it is extremely difficult to predict the possible technology evolutions. The MDE approach is highly interesting in this context, because this methodology puts the focus on the functional aspects of the applications under development and not on technical considerations, concerning the various programming languages and operating systems. As a consequence a Model Driven Environment is probably at present the only practical way to develop applications that fulfil the user requirements, without having to continuously adapt the programs to the changes resulting from the technology evolutions.
A vital question to ask under these circumstances is the following : is it possible to find proven tools that effectively correspond to such an MDE approach?
At CompoSys we are convinced we have the answer; for 15 years we have been using the methodology and the associated tools, that are the results of the very innovative work of James Martin Associates and Texas Instruments between 1980 and 1990. The owner and the name of the product have changed several times, but the software is still as valid as it has ever been. Nowadays we are more particularly able, starting from a single model, to automatically generate applications that are completely operational in all of the following environments :
- Operating systems : mainframe, various Unix platforms (AIX, HP-UX, SUN Solaris), Linux, virtual Java machines , Windows environments (NT, 2000, XP)
- Generated languages : C, COBOL, Java, C#
- Relational data bases : DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, all data bases that can be accessed by ODBC or JDBC
- User interfaces : 3270 green screens, GUI, client - server, HTML or JSP, ASP.NET
- Component Execution Environments: proprietary environment, specific to the toolset (Component Standard CS/3.1) on the various above mentioned platforms, Enterprise Java Beans and .Net
- Possibility to automatically change the component operations to Web Services
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