Google for Model Driven Architecture or MDA. Here's one hit, an article by Scott Ambler who shows up here now and then:
Examining the MDA. I'm underwhelmed by the idea ... I seem to have heard it before from many people with something to sell.
Even so, I kind of like code generators. I wrote some very productive round-trip tools back in mainframe days. (Still have them if you write BMS maps for CICS.) We use one from a vendor today that generates some very useful code, but is almost more work than writing the code. That's the measure that most tools fail on ... being easier to model and generate than to just code. You have to convince developers that the tool gives them some real value, not just more pain. When it's easier for them to do the wrong thing than the right thing, the game is over.
[ January 19, 2007: Message edited by: Stan James ]