MDA y Open Source II

De una entrevista de CodeGeneration.net a Andrew Watson, sobre el esfuerzo open source en los desarrollos dirigidos por modelo (MDA):

CGN: How do you see Open Source efforts, like AndroMDA, fitting into the MDA picture?

Andrew: OMG has had a long a fruitful relationship with the Open Source community stretching back over ten years. Because our specifications have always been completely free to download from our web site, and are largely free of licencing or patent restrictions, the Open Source community has implemented many of OMG's specifications over the years. For example, there are probably a dozen open-source implementations of OMG's CORBA middleware, many of them of commercial quality, including ORBit, the CORBA ORB at the heart of the GNOME Open Source Linux desktop, and MICO, an open-source ORB that's used by The Weather Channel and elsewhere.

UML and OMG's other modelling specifications are 5-7 years younger than the middleware work, but already there's an interesting range of open source work implementing them, including the ArgoUML design tool, the Netbeans Integrated Development Environment and the Eclipse IDE and the AndroMDA tool that you mentioned.

If the development of open-source MDA tools follows the pattern set by open-source CORBA then we'll see commercial and open-source tools thriving side-by-side. Open source gives a low-cost entry route for engineers wanting to experiment with the technology, and high-quality open-source tools will certainly be used for enterprise-strength projects. On the other hand, commercial tools will probably support a wider variety of target platforms, and of course many customers will buy from a commercial vendor because their lawyers want to see a purchase contract :-). In any case, the healthy competition between commercial and open-source products will benefit the MDA-using customer.

Existe un creciente número de proyectos open source siguiendo los estándares de OMG, en mayor o menor medida. Algunos de ellos más bien experimentales o académicos, pero otros de alcance general, y algunos utilizados en proyectos de verdadero valor. A los detallados por Watson, podríamos agregar OpenMDX, StarUML, u OpenAmeos, entre otros. Una lista bastante completa se puede encontrar en CodeGeneration. Más adelante, habrá aquí una lista de todos los proyectos conocidos, comentados (en la medida de mis posibilidades).