MDA components: A flexible way for implementing the MDA approach

Abstract

As the Model Driven Development (MOD) and Product Line Engineering (PLE) appear as major trends for reducing software development complexity and costs, an important missing stone becomes more visible: there is no standard and reusable assets for packaging the know-how and artifacts required when applied these approaches. To overcome this limit, we introduce in this paper the notion of MDA Component, i.e., a packaging unit for encapsulating business know-how and required resources in order to support specific operations on a certain kind of model. The aim of this work is to provide a standard way for representing this know-how packaging units. This is done by introducing a two-layer MOF-compliant metamodel. Whilst the first layer focuses on the definition of the structure and contents of the MDA Component, the second layer introduces a language independent way for describing its behavior. For a full specification, both layers can be merged using the UML2.0 package merge facility. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.