Programming languages had several (r)evolutionary steps in their history. Some people argue that model-driven approaches will be The Next Big Thing. There are tools like openArchitectureWare, AndroMDA, Sculptor/Fornax Platform etc. that promise incredible productivity boosts. However, I made the experience that it is either rather easy in the beginning to get started but as well to get stuck at some point when you try something that was unanticipated or pretty hard to find enough information that tells you how to start your project because there may be a lot of things to consider.
I think an important insight to get anything out of model-driven something is to understand that the model is not necessarily a set of nice pictures or tree model or UML, but may as well be a textual description (e.g. a state machine, business rules etc.).
What do you think and what does your experience tell you? Is there a future for model-driven development (or whatever you may want to call it)?
Update: There does not seem to be a lot of interest in this topic. Please let me know, if you have any (good or bad) experience with model-driven approaches or why you think it’s not interesting at all.
I think, it will take time, till the tools get more refined, more people gain experience with MDD. At the moment if you want to get something out of MDD you have to invest quite a lot, so its use remains limited.
Looking at openArchitectureWare for example: While it is quite robust and basic documentation exists, documentation on the inner workings are missing and there are still problems with scalability, that are undocumented – maybe that will get better when Xtext and Xpand get rewritten.
But despise those limitations the generation itself is quite easy with oAW, you can navigate your models like a charm in Xtend and Xpand and by combining several workflows into bigger workflows, you can also do very complex things. If needed you can resort to Java, so you have a very big flexibility in what you can do with your models. Writing your own DSL with Xtext in oAW, too, is quickly done, yet you get your meta-model, a parser and a very nice editor basically for free. Also you can get your models basically from everywhere, e.g. a component that can convert a database into a meta-model and corresponding models can be written without big effort.
So I would say, MDD is still building up, as tools and experience with it increases. It can already used successfully, if you have the necessary expertise and are ready to push it within your company. In the end, I think, it is a very good thing, because a lot of glue code (aka copy paste) can and should be generated. Doing that with MDD is a very nice and structured way of doing this, that facilitates reusability, in my opinion.