Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a new approach to software development that helps companies manage large, complex software projects and save development costs while allowing new technologies that come along to be readily incorporated. Although it is based on many long-standing industry precepts and best practices, such as UML, it is enough of a departure from traditional IT approaches to require some "proof of the pudding." Real-Life MDA is composed of six case studies of real companies using MDA that will furnish that proof. The authors' approach MDA projects by describing all aspects of the project from the viewpoint of the end-users—from the reason for choosing an MDA approach to the results and benefits. The case studies are preceded by an introductory chapter and are followed by a wrap-up chapter summarizing lessons learned. Written for executives, analysts, architects, and engineers positioned to influence business-oriented software development at the highest levels Filled with concrete examples and analyses of how MDA is relevant for organizations of various sizes Considers a range of uses for MDA—from business process analysis to full-scale software modeling and development Presents results for each case study in terms of tangible, measured benefits, including automatically generated code, defect reduction, improved visibility, and ROI

"Highlights of this book include: the MDA framework, including the Platform Independent Model (PIM) and Platform Special Model (PSM); OMG standards and the use of UML; MDA and Agile, Extreme Programming, and Rational Unified Process (RUP) development; how to apply MDA, including PIM-to-PSM and PSM-to-code transformations for Relational, Enterprise JavaBean (EJB), and Web models; transformations, including controlling and tuning, traceability, incremental consistency, and their implications; metamodeling; and relationships between different standards, including Meta Object Facility (MOF), UML, and Object Constraint Language (OCL)."--Jacket.

Ways of Dying tells the story of the eccentric but dignified professional mourner, Toloki. His odyssey takes him from a rural village community to the shabby, vibrant outskirts of a contemporary South African city, where the tenderness that springs up between him and the beautiful and tragic Noria helps them to heal the past. By turns magical, brutal, and funny, this compelling work is a major new contribution to South African writing.

A startling novel by the leading writer of the new South Africa In The Heart of Redness -- shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize -- Zakes Mda sets a story of South African village life against a notorious episode from the country's past. The result is a novel of great scope and deep human feeling, of passion and reconciliation. As the novel opens Camugu, who left for America during apartheid, has returned to Johannesburg. Disillusioned by the problems of the new democracy, he follows his "famous lust" to Qolorha on the remote Eastern Cape. There in the nineteenth century a teenage prophetess named Nonqawuse commanded the Xhosa people to kill their cattle and burn their crops, promising that once they did so the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive the occupying English into the ocean. The failed prophecy split the Xhosa into Believers and Unbelievers, dividing brother from brother, wife from husband, with devastating consequences. One hundred fifty years later, the two groups' decendants are at odds over plans to build a vast casino and tourist resort in the village, and Camugu is soon drawn into their heritage and their future -- and into a bizarre love triangle as well. The Heart of Redness is a seamless weave of history, myth, and realist fiction. It is, arguably, the first great novel of the new South Africa -- a triumph of imaginative and historical writing.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year South African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda's remarkable life story of growing up in South Africa, Lesotho, and America, told with style and gusto. Zakes Mda is the most acclaimed South African writer of the independence era. His novels tell stories that venture far beyond the conventional narratives of a people's struggle against apartheid. In this memoir, he tells the story of a life that intersects with the political life of his country but that at its heart is the classic adventure story of an artist, lover, father, teacher, and bon vivant. Zanemvula Mda was born in 1948 into a family of lawyers and grew up in Soweto's ambitious educated black class. At age fifteen he crossed the Telle River from South Africa into Basutoland (Lesotho), exiled like his father, a "founding spirit" of the Pan Africanist Congress. Exile was hard, but it was just another chapter in Mda's coming-of-age. He served as an altar boy (and was preyed on by priests), flirted with shebeen girls, feared the racist Boers, read comic books alongside the literature of the PAC, fell for the music of Dvorák and Coltrane, wrote his first stories—and felt the void at the heart of things that makes him an outsider wherever he goes. The Soweto uprisings called him to politics; playwriting brought him back to South Africa, where he became writer in residence at the famed Market Theatre; three marriages led him hither and yon; acclaim brought him to America, where he began writing the novels that are so thick with the life of his country. In all this, Mda struggled to remain his own man, and with Sometimes There Is a Void he shows that independence opened the way for the stories of individual South Africans in all their variety.

Kristin Uys is a tough Roodepoort magistrate who lives alone with her cat. She is on a one-woman crusade to wipe out prostitution in the town for reasons that have personal significance for her. Although she is unable to convict the Visagie Brothers, Stevo and Shortie, on charges of running a brothel, she manages to nail Stevo for contempt of court and gives him a summary six-month sentence. From Diepkloof Prison, the outraged Stevo orchestrates his revenge against the magistrate, aided and abetted by his rather inept brother Shortie and his erstwhile nanny, Aunt Magda, who believes mass action will force the powers that be to release Stevo. Kristin receives menacing phone calls and her home is invaded and vandalised. Even her cat is threatened. The chief magistrate insists on assigning a bodyguard to protect her. To Kristin's consternation, security guard Don Mateza moves into her home and trails her everywhere. Nor does this suit Don's long-time girlfriend Tumi, former model and successful businesswoman, who is intent on turning Don into a Black Diamond sooner rather than later. And Don soon finds that his new assignment has unexpected complications which Tumi simply does not understand. In Black Diamond, Zakes Mda tackles every conceivable South African stereotype, skilfully (and with the lightest touch) turning them upside down and exposing their ironies, often hilariously. This is a clever, quirky novel that captures the essence of contemporary life in Gauteng and will resonate with all South Africans.

A new novel by a towering presence in contemporary South African literature In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior in South Africa's white-ruled Free State were charged with breaking apartheid's Immorality Act, which forbade sex between blacks and whites. Taking this case as raw material for his alchemic imagination, Zakes Mda tells the story of a family at the heart of the scandal -and of a country in which apartheid concealed interracial liaisons of every kind. Niki, the fallen madonna, transgresses boundaries for the sake of love; her choices have repercussions in the lives of her black son and mixed-race daughter, who come of age in post-apartheid South Africa, where freedom prompts them to reexamine their country's troubled history at first hand. By turns earthy, witty, and tragic, The Madonna of Excelsior is a brilliant depiction of life in South Africa and of the dramatic changes between the 1970s and the present.