Blogged almost-live from the SDForum's Architecture SIG at which NetMesh's Joaquin Miller is talking about the Unified Modeling Language and the Object Management Group's Model-Driven Architecture.

He defines the often-used terms and their relationships: PIM (platform-independent model), PSM (platform-specific model), the generation process, the possible outputs: other models, code, documentation etc.

There are lots of questions from the about 50 architects in the room, like:

• how real is all of this?
• isn't technology X supposed to be the solution to this? (where X is "web services", "tool Y from vendor " etc.)

The vision is: you have a model, you have some other information, and then you generate your PSM or code. Joaquin is refreshingly honest about how little real-world proven examples exist yet that really follow the canonical process.

Leon Starr, the other speaker, says that he started doing model-driven design 20 years using AutoCAD as his CASE tool. Wow! He has an example where someone generated code for a pace maker from a model, and the code fit into 77 KB of memory.

One-on-one and small group discussions continue for an hour longer than the event; this is clearly a subject dear to the heart of many software architects.