Today, application development remains a laborious process, with relatively little reuse or automation. Programmers have to manually map their analysis models to target platform architectures, such as J2EE and .NET, and eventually, to code. Often they spend more time focusing on the constraints of the platform than on the problem domain. The result? The analysis and design models become simply documentation artifacts - often hung on a wall and not properly maintained. This makes the applications hard to evolve later and the retargeting of an application to a new platform almost impossible.

Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a framework for model-based development being standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG) that addresses these problems. In MDA, developers and analysts focus on the problem domain and create platform independent models (PIMs). These models can then be leveraged by using a platform specific model (PSM) to transform the business objects, rules, and system constraints into code for a targeted architectural platform.

The benefit of this approach is that development time is reduced, focus is driven towards the business domain rather than technology, and defects are brought to the surface faster. Organizations adopting the MDA initiative can now leverage software like OLIVANOVA The Programming Machine to get a jump on the competition.