Session Title Developing n-tier JEE Enterprise Applications using MDA

Session Type Experience Report
Duration 60 minutes
Session Description

SciSys is a systems integrator and software house that has been using MDA since 2005 to develop applications for our clients in the areas of government and space. In this session we describe our experiences of using MDA and code generation to develop large n-tier JEE enterprise applications.

During the course of this work we have extended the out-of-the-box capabilities of our MDA tools by:

  1. Developing a domain specific language to allow requirements to be captured in a language that is natural to the business (i.e. in MDA terms create a CIM level model (the one that sits above the PIM) of the problem domain) and transformations to convert this model into PIM (domain class) models.
  2. Developing a PIM level meta-model to allow us to model use cases and a set of transformations to generate PIM level models (e.g. web flows).
  3. Extending the existing PSM level meta-models and developing of our own so that we could model our JEE architecture.
  4. Developing transformations to generate code into our own JEE architectural frameworks (PIM-PSM transformations and PSM-Code transformations).
As well as the above, we will discuss the issues that we were faced with by using MDA, such as the problems of:
 
  • Selling such an approach to our clients, our management and also to our developers.
  • The issue of having large numbers of developers using an MDA tool and so much of the design of the application in an MDA tool.
  • How to manage upgrades to the metamodels and transformations.
Speaker(s) Tony Wilkins (SciSys UK)
Tony Wilkins is a senior developer and mentor at SciSys. Tony is the architect of SciSys’ MDA approach and has been responsible for the design and development of meta-models, model-to-model and model-to-code transformations.
Richard Hensman (SciSys UK)
Richard Hensman is a senior consultant and technical architect at SciSys. Richard has been involved in SciSys’ adoption of MDA from its conception and has developed a number of Domain Specific Languages, meta-models and model-to-model transformations.

Intended Audience Beginners and upwards.