The company has recruited Jochen Seeman, who was responsible for product management of Rational’s Rose and XDE modeling platforms, and Wojtek Kozaczynski, director of Rational architectures and application frameworks.
Both share more than 30 years’ experience, with Seeman involved in object orientation analysis and design, visual modeling, and Kozaczynski a noted UML author and specialist in building software.
Additionally, Microsoft has snagged at least one UML expert from IBM itself. Rational, meanwhile, downplayed the losses, calling it business as usual.
Sources told ComputerWire, though, the men will help Microsoft flesh-out its Enterprise Architect product. The company has a four-year roadmap to enhance and simplify Enterprise Architect’s ability to build workflows for web services through a planned modeling framework.
Enterprise Architect currently provides visual application design and development with pre-built components for Visual Studio.NET. Microsoft also currently provides Visio with Office for modeling, but this is regarded as more of a simple white boarding system and doesn’t support the Object Management Group’s (OMG’s) latest version of UML.
Like most ISVs and platform vendors, Microsoft wishes to simplify application modeling to the point where aspects like workflows can be removed from the hands of developers and placed in the hands of business managers.
Workflows define the functionality provided in an application or service, and are today mostly programmed into applications by software developers and coders.
This means, when changes are required developers must be involved, potentially slowing down the process. Additionally, workflows are mostly embedded in the application code, meaning changes are hard to affect and require development effort.
By building a workflow framework and giving the tools to business managers, Microsoft could potentially speed the process by which applications are changed or updated.
Microsoft is also attempting to narrow the gap between .NET and Java, which has a stable of maturing UML tools from various vendors and is viewed as a serious contender for building complex applications.
Michael Blechar, Gartner vice president and director of research, said Microsoft is attempting to provide robust modeling for .NET. People who tend to do very robust modeling and complex solutions today have been doing that in EJBs [Enterprise Java Beans].
Microsoft’s planned framework is expected to automate and dumb down elements of workflow for development of complex applications, according to one source. It is believed Microsoft will build extensions from UML into Visual Studio.NET via the framework.
IDC’s director of application development and deployment Rikki Kirzner called Microsoft’s strategy and hires extremely important. People are moving to an abstract level of development. The acquisition of Rational leaves them without a partner, she said.
Microsoft was unwilling to comment on the hires or its strategy.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
