introduction

Generating software automatically has been a strong ambition since the early days of software development. It is usually accompanied by objectives like building more efficient, reliable, robust and flexible systems that are less expensive and easier to understand at the same time.

Challenge

Some say that in recent years notable progress has been made in software generation. On the other hand it turned out that these achievements usually came at a high price. This is particularly true if new special purpose languages, tools, processes, (meta) meta models and other things come into play that significantly increase the intricacy of the already extremely complex software engineering business.

jMDA is different. It streamlines proven, widely known and accepted open source technologies into a most comprehensible and easy to use set of Java libraries that are extremely powerful and flexible at the same time. The main purpose of jMDA is

• to leverage a comprehensible and easy to use modelling environment,
• to provide convenient and complete access to modelling information and
• to make available easy to use software generator facilities.

Benefits

With these accomplishments focus can be drawn from technical aspects towards what jMDA considers to be the most valuable benefits of model driven development:

• Models have to provide a common understanding of a domain that is shared between domain experts and software engineers.
• Modelling has to be really easy so that technical and non-technical members of a project team can actively take part in modelling.
• Models have to be meaningful so that properly functioning technical artefacts can be generated automatically based on model information.

Given these benefits model driven development turns out to be extremely productive, flexible and fun.

Commercial Aspects

jMDA is open source. This makes it also a commercially competitive option in software development projects whenever there is a demand for automation of building software from models. Not only that jMDA technology comes for free, it also fosters transparency of the overall software process and boosts productivity and motivation of all participants.