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Origins of MDA
Officially, the original impetus for the MDA initiative came from OMG staff in 2000. An initial MDA white paper was drafted and was subsequently refined by OMG members. In September 2001, a series of votes established the MDA as the base architecture for the organisation's standards.
However, the ideas behind the Model Driven Architecture approach were around for at least a decade earlier and these can still be found.
For example, the Shlaer-Mellor Method from Project Technology has been in use since 1987 in the UK and even earlier in the USA. From the start, this method described the separation of subject matters into their own domains and rigorous executable analysis models. Both these aspects are fundamental to MDA.
Moreover, Project Technology started to publish papers on what they called Recursive Design around 1990. This introduced two advanced ideas which were, in hindsight, before their time.
The first new concept was what they called the "Software Architecture". This is an integral but reusable part of any system that is responsible for providing an environment suitable for executing objects established in the analysis models. A sort of high level "Virtual Machine".
The other significant idea was "Translation". This described a technique to automatically generate code from a MetaModel (populated by the Application Models) by using code templates designed to create code in potentially any target language.
Taken together, the concepts of Software Architecture and Translation correspond directly to the MDA's Model Compiler idea.
Project Technology's attempt to market the advanced ideas embodied in the badly named "Recursive Design" method were not particularly successful. Although several interesting papers concerning Translation and bridging between domains were made available on their Website, the much needed Recursive Design book that was scheduled for the early nineties was never published.
It's regrettable that Steve Mellor's and the late Sally Shlaer's contribution to MDA is rarely acknowledged in published papers. Nor have they been given the recognition they deserve by the OMG.
Today, Project Technology is one of OMG’s leading MDA contributor members. Steve Mellor chairs the Analysis and Design Task Force Working Group on MDA, a key group contributing to the detailed definition of MDA elements.
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