Model driven development course

A university project that showed me the dark side of model driven development.

More information

Don't get me the wrong way, I absolutely adore model driven development and its practical applications. For example, when you can point your application instance to a live database instance and generate either a full list of baseline migrations, or maybe entity mappings for your OCR or other DB access solution of choice. I love it when you can point a tool or a build step at your service definitions in your code and generate OpenAPI specs for your APIs.

What I did

And yet, in this course, I struggled. The idea was to explore models and metamodels, to model a problem domain and eventually get to some basic codegen. The problem is that this OCL approach to modeling was utterly detached from reality and didn't even work that well. The software used crashed often, the generation rules and language were all nonsensical - it was good for nothing but toy programs.

What I learnt

I think that model driven development has lots of potential, even how you could generate full client stubs based on a WSDL file for a certain service, a seemingly long lost bit of wisdom that we're only recently rediscovering. However, somehow most of these academia oriented approaches just fall short, especially when plagued by the issues of unstable Eclipse plugins.