I have trough the summer experimented with EMF, GMF and OpenArchitectureWare to create a domain specific tool chain to support model driven development of business processes. The experiments are very promising and I have decided not to continue my work on the ADWorkbench, i.e. ADModeler, ADSpecialiser and ADTransformer.

 

ADWorkbench implements some very interesting ideas, but it is an early prototype. It is build on UML, EMF and GEF, and I have used much time understanding and implementing low level editor functionality in GEF.

 

Therefore it was (after some initial pain) a relief to get to know GMF (Graphical Modeling Framework), which I have used to model and generate 3 different domain specific editors for Danske Bank. I further started to use Rational Software Architect to model my meta models in UML and export them as UML2 to eclipsse, where I used them as basis for EMF generation. I have used OpenArchitectureWare as the transformation framework, and it is a powerful framework which has helped me a lot.

 

I now have a working prototype that provides a business process modeling editor, additional editors to model complementary models, and tranformations to generate BPEL code. Further, I succeded to create a tool that is able to persist introduced manual changes in generated models. This is very prowerful as changes in higher level models will not override manual changes in lower level models.

 

Overall, I am very satiesfied with the experiements, and I will start to write a technical report about them, which hopefully will find its way to an article. I have also started to look for a suitable case to test my tools against.

 

I will write more about the above, when I make more progress, and I will put out a live demo of the tools.