UML 2.0 support

[Markus Hanke]

Hello mdr team,

since the last statement regarding UML 2.0 (i.e. corresponding versions
of  XMI, JMI and MOF) is over half a year old, I took the freedom to ask
for the latest news regarding this topic.

One of the last mails regarding this stated that there would be not
enough use cases for this. From my point of view, one of the main use
cases of mdr is to read UML models, and of course many of them are UML 2
now.
I'm using mdr since two years now as a development tool for generating
Java code based on a UML model in a big software development team (over
30 developers). The team naturally evaluates new UML modeling tools from
time to time, and of the currently evaluated products is the Rational
Software Architect, which uses UML 2 XMI files as the main format to
store its model data.

Thanks for the great tool all the same
-Markus Hanke

[Pieter Van Gorp-2]

Hi all,
I agree with Markus.

Some time ago Petr requested the community for a number of primary use
cases for MDR.  He would add it to the list he's collecting from Sun
internally.

In my opinion the role of MDR is to provide an integration
infrastructure for models.  In that sense it did a good job for MOF
1.x.  For some reason one has been waiting a long time for an official
(OMG/JCP approved) MOF 2/JMI 2 instead of catching up with practical
industry standards such as EMF and ECORE.

Perhaps opposed to others, I'm not so much concerned with new
persistence layers for MDR.  Instead, I hope it will allow one to
 1 load any model that conforms to any XMI version (1.x, 2.x,
industry-hype.x, ...),
 2 query/update the models with JMI 1.  Support for future versions of
JMI would be a nice extra but I don't see why JMI 1 support would not
remain a valid fallback even when things like EMF etc. would be
supported as well.
 3 export the models to any XMI version

Essentially I'm proposing that ECORE/XMI2 support is added as soon as
possible without sacrificing compatibility with MOF1/JMI/XMI1.
Markus, note that you'd get UML2 support quite easily in this
scenario.

I believe that http://www.topcased.org/ and other open source tools
already supports parts of what I'm proposing on top of MDR and other
frameworks so it's a matter of integrating things back into the MDR
platform.  I believe that otherwise a lot of users will start using
other frameworks that internally wrap MDR as a legacy platform.

Just my 0.02 €,
kind regards,
Pieter.

On 2/17/06, Markus Hanke <Markus.Hanke@...> wrote:

> Hello mdr team,
>
> since the last statement regarding UML 2.0 (i.e. corresponding versions
> of  XMI, JMI and MOF) is over half a year old, I took the freedom to ask
> for the latest news regarding this topic.
>
> One of the last mails regarding this stated that there would be not
> enough use cases for this. From my point of view, one of the main use
> cases of mdr is to read UML models, and of course many of them are UML 2
> now.
> I'm using mdr since two years now as a development tool for generating
> Java code based on a UML model in a big software development team (over
> 30 developers). The team naturally evaluates new UML modeling tools from
> time to time, and of the currently evaluated products is the Rational
> Software Architect, which uses UML 2 XMI files as the main format to
> store its model data.
>
> Thanks for the great tool all the same
> -Markus Hanke
>