The Role of Model-Driven Architecture in Online Web-Based Admission System Muniba Memon Department of Computer System and Software Engineering Mehran University of Engineering and Technology munasads@gmail.com Asadullah Shaikh Research Group in Software Engineering Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Barcelona Spain ashaikh@uoc.edu Abstract—Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a development methodology that is gaining in popularity. In real time web- based online application system, MDA can be used to develop systems in an automated way. This research is based on the role of MDA in the development of web-based application system through transformation. The transformation is the vital part of the development strategy because in the todays world people like to save their time and cost. Currently technologies are changing day by day for better and quick results, due to that the demands and needs of MDA are also increasing rapidly. I. I NTRODUCTION In the current environment several universities are using semi-automatic system for admission, which covers manual form filling by downloading admission form from the web of respective university. It creates the problem for students to fill the form under manual environment. In that stage there is a need of such system which helps the students to work more comfortably. The online web-based admission system will facilitate the user to fill the form online from the web and submit before due date. After submission, the student will get an email containing their user ID and password from the system, that email can be used to check their admission status online. Including that the system will enable the user to edit the data online before the last date of submission of application, as the user’s status is being changed by admission staff i.e. selected and not selected. At the same time this system will also facilitate the admis- sion staff to view the user profile and so on. First of all the admission staff will be assigned the user ID and password from the system administrator to log on admin area. After the log on the admission staff can view the user profile, can change the status of user i.e. selected or not selected, can change the last of application for admission, can modify the last of admission and finally can switch them self from the system. To design such a system in a short period of time is quite challenging task. MDA helps to develop several sys- tems through certain transformation, which also saves several resources. Until now, most of the systems have been developed through function-based analysis and with procedural languages like C for implementation purposes. However, in order to take advan- tage of object-oriented paradigms in the development, there is a need for tools that support analysis through implementation of target systems in an object-oriented way. For this pur- pose, model-based processes can be used in the development of embedded systems. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is one such process, and it is used in the online web-based admission system by e.g. DaimlerChrysler[2]. This process enables services for defining software models and facilitating transformations between different model types[1]. In addition, MDA provides interoperability among heteroge- neous modeling environments; it shifts focus from translating models into code towards writing transformation rules for your models. Hence, code gets automatically generated and every time there is change in the model or in code, both views are synchronous. II. PURPOSE The purpose of the research paper is to provide an overview of development method, design, discussion and testing of web- based online admission system generated from transformation using MDA. Further more the purpose of system is to con- vert semi-automatic system into web-based online admission system. III. MDA AND ITS BASIC CONCEPTS Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is the framework for next generation software development approach proposed by OMG adhering to its motto of interoperable, platform inde- pendent and flexible designs. MDA is not about a set of tools or standards, rather it is about the way you attack a particular software design and development task. It focuses on making sure that you can put together your existing systems with your future new systems and with what youre building right now [3]. To facilitate the interoperability be-tween different tools and allow exchange of metadata between tools and repositories in distributed heterogeneous environments MDA comes with a set of standards such as MOF (Meta Object Facility) and XMI (XML Metadata Interchange), in addition to UML (Unified Modeling Language). As per OMG specifications MDA is consist of two differ- ent types of models, called as Platform Independent Model (PIM) and Platform Specific Model (PSM). To transform a