If for no other reason, I may give AndroMDA a solid look just to present a cost-saving alternative if we decide we’re just hell-bent on having such a tool.

I’ll also try and give the idea more of a chance than I’m willing to give CompuWare from here forward. Problem is, you have them (whose solution I don’t like at all), IBM/Rational (I’ve found Rational’s products to be far too restrictive/difficult to use in the past), and then the runners-up (although I’ve heard a good bit about AndroMDA). And it’s always dicey going with a non-front-runner.

If you look at the MDA standard what they are trying to do is pretty simple. They are defining a standard for representing the object model of the application, which can be restricted to the persistence model for a more pragmatic approach.

They are also defining that there should be two models, a platform specific one and a platform independent one. The platform specific one should be built from the independent one by a mechanism that understands the territory. So if you don’t want EJBs, you want POJOs, then change the translator to build POJOs. A good system should make that easy.

I think your BS-ometer is on and functioning. I just think you need to look beyond particular vendors. There is value in building the grunt code with a generator. The trick is in building or buying a good generator. You might want to look at other projects, like AndroMDA, which is an open-source MDA implementation.