The last three days I had the opportunity to tap into the mind of Markus Völter, one of the initial contributors to openArchitectureWare and in his own words "general propaganda minister of Model Driven Software Development" - a model based architecture and development methodology. First of all, MDSD seems to have its epicenter in Germany, although in the US, Mr. Völters explained, the military industry does something similar. Germans fame for exactness and quality focus, complies with MDSD perfectly since it tries to create a formal model of a domain. Essentially it means to "formalize" a certain domain into a processable language. Uh! Can you repeat this? MDSD has its roots in Generative Programming and therefore it tries to generate code! The configuration language for generating the code is tailored to describe a certain domain exactly so you can generate all possible variants of the domain. Such a language is then a meta model and a program in the language can be called a model. The program itself, usually, can not be executed, but must be translated into a target platform. This target platform can be a programming-language or preferable a framework in a programming language. Take the profitable example of a architecture language. What we gain by such a domain specific language? First of all the famous Ubiquitous Language itself. Software architects consider the definition and institutionalization of of a common understanding of domain concepts part of their job description. And its a painful work! By designing a tailored language of architectural concepts and their relationships we strive for a closed system, a (meta-)model of what means architecture for us.Thus we can define a system, its components, their properties and their relationships. We can restrict certain relationships, e.g. circular dependencies and build models, programs which use the language to describe new applications we design. The bigger the IT-organization the bigger the value in such a language. Generative programming techniques allow you to generate executable code out of this abstract architecture program. The business logic must be done either manually or with an own business DSL, since it relays on a different domain than architecture.

openArchitectureWare makes it mind-blowing easy to design a DSL and generate code from it.