XMI Gets Boost from Rational and Unisys - Technology Information

ENT, Feb 23, 2000 by Brian Ploskina

Standards are a useful tool in an ever-changing global enterprise. To make the lives of IT professionals, particularly developers, easier, standards are sometimes the only things preventing a brand new learning curve every time developers start new projects. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the most exciting programming tool since Java, but it is going through a molasses-like process of standards approval. No one ever said standards are adopted quickly.

One offshoot of XML is the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI). This branch of the standard is designed to streamline collaborative application development efforts on the Web. XMI was adopted by the Object Management Group (OMG, www.omg.org) in March 1999, but none of the participating vendors -- IBM Corp. (www.ibm.com), Unisys Corp. (www.unisys.com), Oracle Corp. (www.oracle.com) and Rational Software Corp. (www.rational.com) -- had done anything with it. Until last month.

Rational announced it would be integrating XMI technology from Unisys into Rational Rose 2000 -- the company's widely used visual modeling environment -- as well as other Unified Modeling Language (UML) based tools and environments. The software is available as an addition, which can be downloaded from the Rational's Web site.

XMI is intended to give developers working with object technology and using a diverse set of tools the ability to exchange programming data over the Internet in a standard method. For example, if a team designed and created the architecture of the application, they can send the object to the programmers, who can then make changes or additions using different software.

With tools that understand XMI, UML, and the Meta Object Facility (MOF), developers can

With tools that understand XMI, UML, and the Meta Object Facility (MOF), developers can design an object in IBM's VisualAge for Java, tweak it in Rational Rose, and then work with it once again in Oracle Designer -- all without losing a single line of data. As a result, development teams dispersed across the globe using various tools from multiple vendors can still collaborate on applications. "This is about the maturation of XMI: from an early specification to a more mature representation," says Sridhar Iyengar, chief architect of metadata services at Unisys. "Since Rational is the most significant UML vendor, this puts their stamp of approval on this interoperability."

Before this announcement, the technology was available, but it was much more difficult to take advantage of. You had to be both a Unisys and Rational customer, modeling the application in Rose, while using the Unisys repository to store objects. Also, the attractiveness of XMI is its ability to interact with the wide selections of development languages. XMI anticipates that vendors will customize applications. Where tools are using custom extensions, and objects are sent from one tool to another, XMI has the ability to transfer the proprietary objects through a special attachment mechanism.

"We are seeing this as a mechanism to use whatever tool they want," Iyengar explains. "In either case, the model and the designs you have can be reused in COM-based development and even in Java-based development. XMI and UML are independent of any middleware."