Several key parts of the MDA vision have already been standardized, including not only the UML, MOF, XMI and CWM, but also the first middleware mapping (to OMG's own CORBA). Several other major MDA foundation specifications are "in the chute," including a middleware-independent mapping for enterprise systems (called "UML Profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing"). In terms of products, MDA will be implemented by tools - or suites of tools - that integrate modeling and development into a single environment that carries an application from the PIM, through the PSM, and then via code generation to a set of language and CONFIGURATION FILES implementing interfaces, bridges to services and facilities, and possibly even business functionality. Several vendors already provide tools that support integration at about this level, including substantial code generation. Although these tools were not built explicitly to OMG's MDA standard (which wasn't complete when they were created), we're pleased to see this level of support for MDA so early in its development, and have collected links to MDA products and vendors that we KNOW about here. Many other vendors are hard at work on MDA-based development tools, so we expect the first generation of tools built explicitly to OMG's standard to emerge in late 2001. Additional vendors' products will join these soon after, so that almost all OMG vendor members (and many non-members) will be represented in the marketplace by products by around the middle of 2002. The generation of application code from an MDA PIM through an automated or semi-automated series of steps will be biggest benefit of MDA. We've pointed to examples (some more limited in scope than the generally-applicable MDA architecture itself), running today, that demonstrate the practicality of this vision. Generally-applicable MDA tools will initially move beyond modeling with the generation of code for 

• Interfaces (in OMG IDL and other interface-defining languages)
• Functionality constrained by a specification (such as the CORBA Component Model, or EJB)
• Access to MDA-standardized Pervasive Services and Domain Facilities 
• Cross-platform access to functionality already standardized in the MDA, via an automatically-generated bridge
• Wrappers for hand-coded execution engines that make access transactional or secure, as long as the basic interfaces to these engines have been defined in the MDA
• Operations that get and set the values of variables declared in the model.

The NEXT versions of tools will code execution of simple business rules; future versions will become even more sophisticated.

Several key parts of the MDA vision have already been standardized, including not only the UML, MOF, XMI and CWM, but also the first middleware mapping (to OMG's own CORBA). Several other major MDA foundation specifications are "in the chute," including a middleware-independent mapping for enterprise systems (called "UML Profile for Enterprise Distributed Object Computing"). In terms of products, MDA will be implemented by tools - or suites of tools - that integrate modeling and development into a single environment that carries an application from the PIM, through the PSM, and then via code generation to a set of language and configuration files implementing interfaces, bridges to services and facilities, and possibly even business functionality. Several vendors already provide tools that support integration at about this level, including substantial code generation. Although these tools were not built explicitly to OMG's MDA standard (which wasn't complete when they were created), we're pleased to see this level of support for MDA so early in its development, and have collected links to MDA products and vendors that we know about here. Many other vendors are hard at work on MDA-based development tools, so we expect the first generation of tools built explicitly to OMG's standard to emerge in late 2001. Additional vendors' products will join these soon after, so that almost all OMG vendor members (and many non-members) will be represented in the marketplace by products by around the middle of 2002. The generation of application code from an MDA PIM through an automated or semi-automated series of steps will be biggest benefit of MDA. We've pointed to examples (some more limited in scope than the generally-applicable MDA architecture itself), running today, that demonstrate the practicality of this vision. Generally-applicable MDA tools will initially move beyond modeling with the generation of code for 

The next versions of tools will code execution of simple business rules; future versions will become even more sophisticated.