The VIDE language will follow the vision of Model Driven Architecture and will attempt to build on the respective modelling standards. This goal leads to executable modelling in UML and ability to create working applications directly from platform independent models, which can be immediately executed and tested.
Consequently, using VIDE together with UML diagrams, will make the whole process of designing and specifying a business application fully visual. VIDE will also explore the approach of so-called code less programming, by enabling the creation of applications without hand coding which would be replaced with a more interactive communication with the computer. Based on the VIDE language, a coherent set of visual tools covering not only coding, but also prototyping, documenting and debugging of business applications will be built. VIDE will also specify a textual syntax which will be especially useful for compact presentation of already constructed portions of code. The choice of preferred view (visual or textual) will belong to the user. Conversion between the visual and textual version of code will be always possible in either direction and will never loose any information. Moreover, many intermediate versions of code, with text-code embedded into diagrammatic-code, will also be provided. To make this idea feasible and to strenghten the productivity of the language, advanced, highly contextual visual interfaces will be developed to construct the VIDE modelling / programming environment.
As the language designated to deal with data-intense application, VIDE is intended to seamlessly integrate the programming language notions with powerful query language features.
Following MDA approach, Platform Independent Models (PIMs) will be translated to Platform Specific Models (PSMs) and then to code by specific model compilers. The business and technical aspects will not be tied to each other and are thus will be developed independently. Supporting this separation will be one of the aims of the aspect-oriented composition mechanisms at the platform-independent level, that will be developed for VIDE. Another important mechanism to be shifted to the PIM level is quality assurance. Computation Independent Models (CIMs) establish a context for application functionality described by the PIMs.
Apart from productivity improvement, the MDA postulate of raising the level of abstraction may lead to business process-centric software development. The area related to it is the service oriented architecture. VIDE models will address the respective integration issues - especially with representing the service invocations. The use of process models to provide system requirements is one way to achieve a greater collaboration amongst developers and end-user groups. By introducing a high level enactable model this collaboration may be further enhanced, since all stakeholders may communicate using a shared 'understandable' model.
