Benefits of Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

MDA separates business logic from the infrastructure that implements it. This allows rapid development and delivery of new interoperability specifications that use new deployment technologies but are based on proven, tested business models.

MDA addresses the challenges of today's highly networked systems environment, providing an architecture that assures:

• Portability, increasing application re-use and reducing the cost and complexity of application development and management, now and into the future.
• Cross-platform Interoperability, using rigorous methods to guarantee that standards based on multiple implementation technologies all implement identical business functions.
• Platform Independence, greatly reducing the time, cost and complexity associated with re-targeting applications for different platforms-including those yet to be introduced.
• Productivity, by allowing developers, designers and system administrators to use languages and concepts they are comfortable with, while allowing seamless communication and integration across the teams.

What exactly is an architecture in the context of IT?
"An architecture is the set of significant decisions about the organization of a software system, the selection of the structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed, together with their behavior as specified in the collaborations among those elements, the composition of these structural and behavioral elements into progressively larger subsystems, and the architectural style that guides this organization [...]"
Source: Booch, Rumbaugh, and Jacobson, The UML Modeling Language User Guide, Addison-Wesley, 1999

There is a lot of material available about MDA at OMG's MDA site. If you just want to get a quick overview, try An Introduction to Model Driven Architecture by Allan Brown and Jim Conallen:

• An introduction to Model Driven Architecture (Part I)
• An introduction to Model Driven Architecture (Part II)
• An introduction to Model Driven Architecture (Part III)

You might also want to read the openMDX Introduction available from the openMDX website.

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