Practical Large-scale Model-Driven Development of Business Applications with an Executable UML

Despite intensive work in academy and industry around it in the last two decades, the discipline of model-driven development with UML apparently has not become the industrial mainstream for building large-scale information systems. In this paper, we present our attitude toward two probably mostly debated topics: 1) the lackluster adoption of MDD with UML in this field; we try to identify and explain what we believe are the main reasons for it, and 2) the controversial debate about general-purpose modeling languages, UML in particular, versus domain-specific modeling languages (DSLs). We present our approach to building large-scale business applications based on an executable profile of UML, named OOIS UML, and implemented as a framework named SOLoist. We also briefly report on our experiences and lessons learnt from successfully using the approach and the framework in industrial projects of different size and domains over the last fifteen years.