Treffer: The Eclipse Modeling Framework.

This article explores the use of a model-driven approach to software development. The idea of building applications by first modeling them, then transforming these models into implementation code has been around for many years. Providing a higher level abstraction for defining software would seem to be a natural evolution. Twenty or so years ago, structured programming languages replaced assembly language, or machine code, as the most popular way to write software. About 10 years ago, object-oriented programming languages became entrenched as the most predominant languages, again raising the abstraction level. Lately, there has been a lot of talk about model-drive development as the next higher level abstraction. Each step in the evolution of software development has been accompanied by skepticism, and model-driven development is no different. The skepticism is usually the result of overly grandiose visions and promises, opening up the visionaries to attack from the more practical types. So, to foster the evolution of widespread model-driven development, a low cost way to gradually introduce it is first needed. The Eclipse Modeling Framework has emerged as a middle-ground in the modeling versus programming worlds.