Digital Earth Weblog

Metis Architect is a enterise architecture modelling tool. It is a “thick client” desktop application. When using the application it didn’t take long to see evidence of Web standards.

Metamodelling tools like Metis use an object oriented approach to modelling whatever it is you want to model. The metamodel defines the objects types (classes), and the allowable relationships between object types. You create object instances to represent your domain of interest. All standard stuff in the metamodelling world.

What was interesting is that there were a bunch of W3C and Internet standards in evidence when using the application:

• Metamodels are stored as XML documents that are full of XLink references and other XML goodness.
• URIs are used to identify object types, object instances, and more.
• SVG is used for graphical representation of all object instances.
• WEBDAV is used for simple team sharing of projects (although that seems to be overshadowed by their RDBMS-based repository).

This was the first desktop application, other than a Web browser, that I had seen which makes such overt use of Web technologies.

Using standardised technologies benefits the software developer. They can leverage existing libraries and skills. Open formats are also good for clients, but as a potential end user that wasn’t the interesting part. Being familiar with XML, URIs and object oriented concepts provided an instinctive understanding of what was going on under the hood, and why some things had to be done the way they were. This made the learning curve shallower than it would have been, at least for part of the application.

However, is needing to know the underlying technologies, in order to better understand a software product, a sign that the user interface design could be improved. I suspect it is.