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Quocirca's Straight Talking: Is programming dead?
MDA takes craft to new highs

By Quocirca

Published: Friday 23 April 2004

Some software tools companies were already ahead of what the OMG is trying to paint as 'new and improved'. Relative newcomer Quovadx, for example, has taken to new levels the concepts of using models as a starting point for code generation, to a point where there becomes less and less need to write code at all. Admittedly most of Quovadx’s examples are specific to certain sectors, for example healthcare and financial services, but it begs the obvious question – how close are we to missing out on the code altogether?

The answer is: very close indeed, if the latest offerings from Select Business Solutions are to be believed. SBS, once the main competitor to Rational Rose in the UK, has combined the concepts of MDA with those of design patterns – saying, essentially, that every structure you can think of in code has been written before and can be specified and reused in modelling terms. By selecting said design patterns and using them as input to the code generators, it should be possible to automate the production of the vast majority of code, if not all of it. SBS is not the only company to be thinking this way. However, it is one of the first to achieve it in practice.

Once again, it is easy to make glib statements and any such claim should be tested carefully. Perhaps the question is not whether SBS or Quovadx, Rational or Borland have succeeded in this instance but rather the fact that they are drawing us inexorably towards a situation where the majority of code is generated. There will be complaints about inefficiency, which is tantamount to saying that there will always be a need for experts developing high-throughput code. For the rest, however, assuming this falls within tolerances, it is worth a shot.

Also, the generated code can incorporate things that the programmers wouldn’t necessarily consider or even know about. As its software division encompasses both software development and enterprise management, IBM has a distinct advantage here: for example, it is looking at how standardised event logging can be built into code generators, as support for its autonomic computing initiatives.

Meanwhile, we should consider all of this in the context of the major application vendors, all of whom have their work cut out developing various types of functionality that can be integrated into applications. In addition, there are the independent solution vendors working on vertical solutions aimed at specific geographies and markets. All of these can benefit from the integration-centric view of MDA, where models act as the glue between pre-fabricated components and services bought in from the specialists.

No programmers should be put out of a job by MDA, as there will always be new and interesting things to develop. However, MDA suggests one last and quite seismic shift. In the future, if the models are king, the onus on programming will move outside the business and into the IT vendor marketplace. This would be no bad thing: insurance companies can get on and deal with insurance and pharmaceutical companies can work on new drugs, rather than using up half their budgets redeveloping old code or trying to work out what the new stuff should look like.

The agreement on MDA as an approach is still to be proven - through its adoption and acceptance by the businesses that decide to use it. It would appear, however, that it is only a matter of time.