The Taylor team announces the release of Taylor MDA 1.3.0. Taylor MDA is an open source, Eclipse-based UML modeling and code generation tool. It leverages a convention-based code generation approach plus stereotypes to generate the maximum amount of code from streamlined UML models. Taylor's model driven architecture simplifies creating JEE applications with UML. Business models are defined using simplified UML diagrams following well-defined conventions. These models are then used to generate the exact same jpa/ejb3/jsf code your would write by hand. Then use the code as is or modify it as you see fit and your changes will be preserved. Here are some of the improvements: * New Maven Project Anatomy * Taylor Portal Plug-in Architecture * Presentation Rules * Re-factored Pickers and ComboBoxes * Re-factored unit test generation plus Cargo & JSFUnit QA testing * Re-factored Pageflow generation * Re-factored Taylor Bpm * New Status Flow generation * LDAP support in Taylor Identity * Taylor Search * Taylor Audit * Seam and Richfaces upgrades * Seam performance improvements * Eclipse 3.5 compatibility * Lots of little stuff... Visit Taylor MDA

Has anybody ever tried Taylor MDA? It looks nice, but how well does it work in real life?

We have been using it for several years on various customer projects. The largest project has upwards of 100 domain entities, but only 2 developers!

I worked with Taylor for 2 years. It is very, very cool!, I worked with AndroMda before, and other code generator that use an UML model, like OptimalJ, but Taylor is my favorite. I have created many new 'cartridges' to generate code for Flex, ZK and even a complete front- and backend for MS CSharp + Silverlight! Creating a new cartridge is relatively easy thanks to very powerful Jet engine combined with Java api (that you can debug!) to parse the UML model. IMO it will take a long time before code generators based on DSL (like Oslo or Mod4J) will be as powerful as Taylor in terms of: -ease of use, -ease to extend, -performance. Note: I have used Taylor 'only' for generating the 1) persistence layer (based on JPA/Hibernate, or Intersystems Cache or Berkeley OO database) 2) the service layer (back- end frontend) 3) corresponding frontend classes (Flex AS classes, or Java DTO objects) 4) basic CRUD forms. Including interfaces, factories, mock objects. junits tests, logging etc where applicable. Hence up till now I did not use Taylor to generate workflows, because I found Taylor in this area to limited. I started however with a fun project called VDSL (Visual DSL) in which I combine Taylor with graphical (Flex) interface to link forms, operations and services.

can you post a link to the VDSL project? Thanks, Jin