Rating: 
Summary: For BridgePoint Suite users or evaluators!
Review: This book heavily uses the BridgePoint tool suite from Project Technology as its basis. Knowing that up front is important because the content is specific to that set of tools. You can get eval copies of the tool suite from the vendor, and should be able to get them from the book's supporting web site, which was not fully operational at the time of this review.The backbone of the book is model driven architecture, which is a strong and practical way to approach design and development. In a nutshell, the BridgePoint tool suite, which consists of modeling and translation tools, allows you to 'draw' the design, using UML, to produce domain partitions, state charts, class diagrams and action specifications. The tool checks your design for consistency and correctness, then the translation tool turns your design into executable code. This is code generation on steroids. Because this book uses a specific product it is most useful to BridgePoint tool users or those who are evaluating this tool set. If you are not in either audience you will probably be disappointed with the book. If you are in either audience, this book is excellent and justifies the 5 stars I am awarding it.
Rating:
Summary: Good ideas bear up well over time.
Review: Two events at the Object-Oriented Systems, Languages, and Applications Conference of 1996 were memorable for me. The first was the opening address given by one of the more insightful architects/designers of the 20th century, Christopher Alexander. And the second was a debate between Stephen Mellor (one of the authors of this book) and Grady Booch on the topic "Translation: Myth or Reality?". Six years later, with the addition of Action Semantacs to UML, the Model Driven Architecture initiative of the Object Management Group, and the publication of this book, it appears that Mr. Mellor is as persistent in his position that executable (and hence translatable) models are indeed a reality, as Mr. Alexander was that the resonance between the structure of a solution and the corresponding problem is a measure of the solution's quality. Good ideas bear up well over time. Mr. Mellor, and this book, are not for the faint hearted. It is his position that building software systems should be more about engineering a solution than artfully handcrafting one, and that to do this, one needs a disciplined process and a rigorous and precise engineering tool: Executable UML. If you agree with this tenet, and accept its implied challenge--or just want to know where they will lead you--this is a book for you. In this book, Mellor and Balcer present a very lean and agile profile of UML and define the underlying execution semantics that enable it to be used as a valuable engineering tool for analyzing, designing, and implementing your systems. They also prescribe an engineering process to follow when modeling a software system, and thoughtfully walk the reader through this process and the various UML models with numerous examples and real-world experiences. If you use UML to model software, and aspire to engineer that software in the process, this book will give you a lot to think about and add significantly to your engineering tool chest.
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