Borland plans to integrate and extend MDA across the company’s products, having spent 2003 integrating the Together application modeling environment with existing and new IDEs for Java, Windows and Unix. Further education of users around MDA is also planned for 2004.

During a recent interview with ComputerWire, vice president and general manager of Borland’s Together business Tony de la Lama said the company would outline its plans for MDA in the first-half of 2004.

De la Lama did not provide product details, but commenting on Borland’s strategy said: We want all the products to have the advantage that modeling brings. Borland has been a code-warrior company [especially for Java]. The Together people think of the world as a model.

MDA is an Object Management Group (OMG) specification gaining traction among ISVs as the acceptable medium for modeling applications.

Modeling is being viewed as an important first step in application lifecycle management (ALM), to build applications based on a defined architecture. This makes applications easy to build and maintain, especially across distributed IT development and runtime teams.

Those subscribing to the concept of application modeling include IBM Corp with its Rational business unit, and Microsoft Corp, with the Whitehorse framework and modeling engine expected with the next edition of Visual Studio.NET due in the second half of 2004.

To help fulfil the modeling part of its own ALM strategy, Borland acquired TogetherSoft in 2002. During 2003, engineers integrated Together’s MDA offering with Borland’s JBuilder suite of Java development tools, C++ tools for Windows and Unix with Enterprise Studio for C++BuilderX, and the recently launched Delphi 8.0.

Long-term, Borland wishes to build on its traditions of Rapid Application Development (RAD) in Windows, by simplifying MDA and hiding the complexity of architecting code.

One objective is for greater synchronization between different models, such as platform-independent models used to outline pure business requirements, and platform-specific models used to build Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) or .NET software.

The task of communicating any differences between models used by different teams is regarded as an inefficient step in the modeling part of the ALM process. Removing the complexity from modeling increases the potential for greater integration between different models.

This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.