This article presents issues encountered as well as practical solutions to using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for design and automatic code generation. Topics presented include general issues found with UML on a real-time systems design project.

This article considers the two most popular starting points for code generation:
* UML for program modelling, part of the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach [2], and
* Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), little languages that are created specifically to model some problem domain.

As well as introducing both approaches, the aim is to offer advice on their usefulness for real-world development. We also ask whether they are mutually exclusive or if in some circumstances it can make sense to combine them.

This article describes the Model Driven Architecture, an OMG standard for software development.

Once during an interview, I was asked why I didn't apply MDA over all software projects I leaded. The question should be hooked as a point of discussion on MDA misconceptions, and generally, on modelling and UML. Unfortunately these interpretations are hindered by a phenomenon that a famous observer of human events (Mark Twain) revealed, that I repropose it again in IT terms: People commonly use UML like a drunk uses a lamp post; For support rather than illumination.

As key part the Oslo tools is a language for modeling textual DSLs (MGrammar). This article is an an attempt to try and use the language to write our own language definition.