Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

The architecture of a system is a specification of software components, interrelationships, and rules for component interactions and evolution over time. In 2001 OMG, adopted an architecture standard, the Model Driven Architecture (MDA). MDA is an architectural framework for improving portability, interoperability and reusability through separation of concerns (MDA, 2003) (MDA, 2005). It is not itself a technology specification but it represents an evolving plan to achieve cohesive model-driven technology specifications. MDA is built on OMG standards including the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) (XMI, 2007) and CORBA (CORBA, 1992) (CORBA, 2002) a major middleware standard. MDA is model-driven because it uses models to direct the complete lifecycle of a system. All artifacts such as requirement specifications, architecture descriptions, design descriptions and code, are regarded as models. MDA provides an approach for specifying a system independently of the platforms that it supports, specifying platforms, selecting a particular platform for the system, and transforming the system specification into one implementation for the selected particular platform. Why MDA? OMG has focused on the creation of open specifications to encourage application interoperability. It was defined to solve enterprise application integration. A middleware describes a piece of software that connects two or more software applications, allowing them to exchange data. To achieve this, it must be implemented for all different languages and platforms that need linking.