Model drive development of enterprise applications

April 14, 2005
Vinay Kulkarni and Sreedhar Reddy | Tata Research Development and Design Centre

Modern enterprises critically depend on a large number of business applications that need to interact with each other. These applications typically have a long life during which they need to cope with changes in business requirements and advances in the technology platforms. These applications typically do not use complex algorithms and data structures but are large in size – typically millions of lines of code – and essentially data-centric in nature having to support multiple views in a consistent manner. We present a model driven development approach wherein applications are specified using different kinds of models and a higher level language that are then translated by a set of code generators incorporating a choice of design strategies, technology platform and architecture into an implementation. This approach has been used to develop several large business-critical applications on a variety of technology platforms supporting various distributed architectures delivering increased productivity, better code quality and easier platform retargettability. However, supporting such variations in design strategies, technology platform and architecture was effort intensive and time consuming. We describe an aspect-oriented approach to restructure our model based code generators that addresses this problem. We also present a meta-data driven aspect oriented software development approach as a lighter weight variant of the model driven development approach. We also touch upon how model based techniques can be used to support application integration, component factories etc. The talk will include demos where appropriate.

Speaker Details

Vinay Kulkarni is a scientist at Tata Research Development and Design Centre – R&D centre of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, India’s largest IT consultancy organization – where he is responsible for a group working on model driven software engineering. Some of his research ideas have found industrial success in MasterCraft (http://www.tcs.com/0_products/mastercraft/index.htm) – a model driven development environment for component based development. Vinay’s other research interests are programming paradigms, business processes and distributed components.

Sreedhar Reddy is a scientist at Tata Research Design and Development Centre. He has been working in the area of model driven development for close to 10 years. He is the chief architrect of the meta-modeling framework of MasterCraft an MDD product from TCS. Currently he is one of the principal investigators at TRDDC looking into the next generation of model driven development technologies. Over the last couple of years he has also been actively involved in OMG Query/View/Transformations standardization initiative. Apart from model driven development, his other research interests include process programming, application integration and domain specific languages.