Many who attended recent meetings featuring industry notables Martin Fowler and Scott Ambler came away with the opinion that MDA was far too complex for real world application development and that a reasonable visual modeling tool was probably unachievable.

COOUG likes controversy, so we found an author of The Agile Manifesto, Jon Kern,  Compuware, who travels in the same circles as Mr. Fowler and Mr. Ambler, but who takes a somewhat contrarian view.

Jon started by emphasizing three keys to software development success:
-- Separation of concerns
-- Duality of Architecture
-- Agile development
with separation of concerns the most important.  Jon acknowledged the complexity of UML, but demonstrated that a pragmatic "distilled" usage has high project value when combined with visual tool support.  

Jon described several real world experiences with the help of Kamesh Challah, an OptimalJ Product Consultant.  A number of real-world concerns were addressed in response to audience questions.
Jon gave a brief MDA tool demonstration using OptimalJ, showing the use of metadata and the separation of concerns along application and technical architecture models.  He illustrated the tool transformations and followed up with an extensive Q&A session.

Jon has provided his Zipped Powerpoint Meeting Slides. 

You can read more about OptimalJ at: http://www.optimalj.com  and http://javacentral.compuware.com/index.htm

For an evaluation copy of OptimalJ. Contact Jon Kern jon.kern@compuware.com  or Brad Lepore brad.lepore@compuware.com . They will provide a CD and license key, along with the tutorial and some friendly pointers on how to get started.

We gave away these eight book door prizes courtesy Compuware,  Addison Wesley, and Prentice-Hall/PTR