Research And Application Of Model Driven Architecture

Model Driven Architecture, MDA, is a software development framework which is proposed by Object Management Group, OMG. MDA is the OMG's solution of the Model Driven Development that is already known for a long time. MDA is supported by a brand of technology specifications that are also managed by OMG, such as UML, MOF, XMI, OCL, CWM, etc. MDA is a model-centric software development framework, and it supports software design, model visualization, model store and mode transformation, etc. Comparing to the traditional software development, the more important feature of MDA is that, the model in MDA not only drives the development process but also drives the model transformation tools, so that runnable code or even complete deployable software could be generated from the model directly.But MDA is still in its infancy phase. The brand specifications that support MDA are not very complete so far. To better fulfill the needs of MDA, those specifications still need to be improved and developed. In the mean while, MDA is a development framework that heavily depends on the tools. In the industry, the tools vendor is actively investigating in first round of building MDA tools. But due to the incomplete specifications, the tool vendor can't implement their tool to perfectly support the MDA related specifications. Most of the current available MDA tools apply their own technologies and solutions to support the MDA development when building their tool.It still needs a long for the MDA related specification and tools to be improved and completed. And also the MDA itself also needs a long time to be grasped by the software developers and be adopted widely in the software development industry. But luckily, the current available MDA technologies and tools are already good enough to bring great benefit for the software development. This thesis first explained the principle of MDA and the basic technologies that support MDA. Then it concludes and anticipates the development direction of MDA. Base on these, it analyses the requirement of an enterprise for the MDA, and concludes a feasible MDA solution for this enterprise. And finally the suitable tools combination has been selected to practice MDA on an Inventory Management System development.