Improving productivity using MDA

Some intersting reads on theserverside and the register about improving productivity using MDA with OptimalJ.

I don’t have any experience yet with optimalj, but my evaluation kit is waiting for me in the post-office. I’m quite curious to see how i’ll like it.

I noticed some scepticism when reading the thread on the serverside, but i’m sure that MDA will improve productivity, especially for standard problems. In the company i work for, it-eye, we use Oracle Designer a lot for generating back-office data entry applications, reports, database pl/sql code and database schema’s. Designer is quite good at this, and most application can be generated for 100%. You see that a lot of our customers aim for this, as it makes upgrading to newer versions of Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and the Oracle RDBMS easier. The more i read about MDA, the more it looks like Oracle Designer, but vendor and platform neutral, based on an open standard.

The problem with Oracle Designer, one customer mentioned, is that it requires a lot of knowledge of the user. He actually wittnessed one developer trying a lot of properties, which took a full day, before the correct application was generated. Using Oracle Developer (oracle’s 4gl gui application tool), this would have taken 10 minutes. Sometimes Designer gets kind of fuzzy and it is not very clear which property to change to change something in the generated application.

So don’t think that you need less knowledgeable developers on your project just because the code is generated. But MDA tools can improve the productivity of skilled developers when creating certain kinds of applications.

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