Creating Domain Models

There is an art to creating domain models. One of the best resources I've found on domain modeling is: Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans. I find it especially helpful to visualize the model while I'm designing, so I use UML class diagrams. There are many tools available to help you create UML diagrams and my personal favorite is OmniGraffle.

The domain models for eTrack have been implemented with the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). For a complete discussion on EMF, I highly recommend the book EMF: The Eclipse Modeling Framework , 2nd edition. There are three ways of creating an EMF model: direct editing of the ecore model, annotated java, and XML Schema. I find direct editing of the ecore model to be the easiest and fastest way to create an EMF model. The general idea is to create an ecore model, a genmodel, and generate the java code. The ecore model describes your packages, classes, attributes, and references. The genmodel is metadata EMF uses to generate the java classes.