What is Design Model Accelerator? and SOAD?

[Praful Gupta]

I imagine SOAD stands for Service-Oriented Analysis and Design but what is Design Model Accelerator? and how does it benefit or fit into the picture of SOA?

Thanks
Praful

[Lee Ackerman]

Hi Praful - thanks for your question.

Yes, SOAD stands for Service-Oriented Analysis and Design. I led the development of the Model Accelerator - a plug-in to Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software.

The Model Accelerator amplifies the capabilities of RSA by providing a set of automations supporting Business Modeling, Service Identification and Service Specification - along with design-time SOA Governance. These automations encapsulate best practices related to the use of DSLs (Business Modeling and SoaML) and Rational SOMA. So what did we automate? We created set of patterns, model constraints and associated reports.

If we contrast the use of the Model Accelerator to the use of a drawing tool (or just working with code) - we see that by having a model that includes design elements, relationships and references to patterns we can enhance our governance efforts, better support design reviews and produce better solutions. So the summary for the benefits for the Model Accelerator is that it lowers the skill threshold when performing SOAD activities, improves the quality of the solution, and improves the design-time governance impact.

Thanks!

Lee.

[Praful Gupta]

So does that mean its tied down to only Rational Architect or can the plug-in work with other IDEs/tools?

[Lee Ackerman]

Currently, the Model Accelerator works with Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software or Rational Software Architect with the SOA and WebSphere Extension.

Our focus was to amplify the capabilities of the underlying platform - and in this case, RSA provides us with a great foundation (SoaML and Rational SOMA) as well as many related and useful features such as transformations that support movement between UML and SOA artifacts (SCA, WSDL, XSD, and BPMN).

Thanks!

Lee.