| Elegant Relational Development
"Hello, I am Eric Jan Malotaux. I work for Elegant Relational Development b.v.,
part of The Elegant Group in The Netherlands (sorry, our website is in Dutch only).
We have a home-developed code generation tool, called Elegance, that we use ourselves in
the development of database applications. However, we have difficulty maintaining this product.
For instance, its use is limited to generating code for only one Windows 4GL, and one DBMS,
and those are not mainstream products anymore.
So much maintenance is needed, that we rather want to replace Elegance with a new tool,
based on the Model-driven Architecture (MDA) family of standards of the Object Management Group
(OMG). We want such a tool to be adaptable to any new circumstances that we may find when
trying to solve problems for our customers. This is one of the reasons, one of the others
being cost, not to buy a commercial product. The new tool, that should probably be characterized
as a CASE-tool, will be based as much as possible on existing Open Source components, and
will itself be an Open Source project. If an Open Source project like this exists - we
don't know of one - we would want to join it. If not, we are willing to initiate and coordinate
one ourselves.
As we see it, apart from a User Interface, we need three different components: a repository,
a modeller, and a suite of generators.
For the repository, the MDR seems to fit this role nicely.
For a modeller, we will see what the modeller you have promised a third party will provide, looks like. We would like a modeller for any MOF-compliant metamodel, so it also could be used as a metamodelling tool.
We don't know of any generators that we could readily use, so these would probably have to be written from scratch.
For a User Interface, we were thinking of NetBeans.
The different tools could be implemented as NetBeans modules."
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