Aonix Contributes Ameos UML Technology to Open Source.

AMEOS Model Driven Architecture Tools Made Available Under LGPL 

PARIS -- Aonix[R], a provider of solutions for mission-critical applications development, announced today that it is contributing its powerful Ameos modeling technology to the open source community. Ameos, based on the pioneering Software through Pictures modeling tool family, offers UML profiles to generate C/C++, Ada, Java, CORBA, COM, and EJB. Under the new open source policy, Ameos is available under terms based on the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) as OpenAmeos. This open source strategy for Ameos allows Aonix to focus marketing resources on its expanding PERC technologies for real-time Java developers, while providing the tools to ensure long-term value to Ameos users.

Ameos implements UML 2.0 profiles, model-driven architecture (MDA) -based model transformation and a modern, convenient user interface--features designed to powerfully meet the modeling needs of modern and complex software systems. Through its UML profiles, developers can easily extend standard UML notation and adapt it to project-specific needs. Since the transformation engine is based on MDA architecture, design time is reduced as the model process is able to mature to a greater level prior to implementing target-specific detail.

"Ameos is a powerful and stable technology," said Dave Wood, Aonix VP marketing. "We believe that the best means of expanding its adoption and evolution comes by donating the source code to Ameos users. It's always exciting to see how open-source communities generously make their own contributions available to others."

For OpenAmeos, strong community support is already in place. ScopeSET, a leading expert in Ameos technology, has partnered with Aonix in this open source initiative. ScopeSET will provide product support and professional services for Ameos and customer-requested derivatives.

"With a long history of developing and supporting Ameos and MDA tools, ScopeSET is pleased to lend its expertise to this important Aonix initiative," said Armin Mueller of ScopeSET. "Our team is committed to continue providing extensive tool-specific know-how to the OpenAmeos community. We will also act as integrators for future OpenAmeos distributions to ensure quality and further development."

Ameos is the second major technology contributed by Aonix to the open source community this year. The decision illustrates Aonix' commitment to selecting licensing terms that best suit the needs of users of each of its product lines. In April, Aonix announced the open source availability of the Aonix Eclipse Ada Development Toolkit. Aonix is leading the new Eclipse-based initiative to create an Ada Development Toolkit (ADT) project and will collaborate with the Eclipse Foundation[TM] toward that end.

Under the terms of the Ameos open source agreement, a "clean" open source version of Ameos, called OpenAmeos, has been created to ensure that anyone installing a new version of Ameos will be able to use it freely without encumbrances of any other source contributions. This version is freely downloadable at http://www.openameos.org. In addition, any company or academic institution who wants to distribute OpenAmeos source code is required to also make their changes to the source code freely available to others in order to ensure the continuing open evolution of Ameos.

Availability

OpenAmeos is available today at no charge from www.openameos.org.

About Ameos

Through UML Profiles support, Ameos offers an easy way to extend standard UML notation and to adapt it to project-specific needs. UML 2.0 describes Profiles and defines how to model them in UML notation. The Ameos Profile Editor allows stereotypes and tagged values to be defined and assigned to model elements of the UML Metamodel, ensuring that profiles are well designed, documented and easy to use for the entire project team.

Ameos also implements a transformation engine based on model-driven architecture (MDA), an OMG initiative designed to separate the technical aspects from the domain aspects of UML models. By creating a Platform Independent Model (PIM), the model's level of abstraction increases and dependency on the target platform is reduced. By model transformation, the PIM is then transferred into a Platform Specific Model (PSM) that contains the technical details. With these features, design time is reduced as the model process is able to mature to a greater level prior to implementing target-specific detail.

About Aonix[R]

Aonix offers mission- and safety-critical solutions primarily to the military and aerospace, telecommunications and transportation industries. Aonix delivers the leading high-reliability, real-time embedded virtual machine solution for running Java[TM] programs deployed today and has the largest number of certified Ada applications at the highest level of criticality. Headquartered in San Diego, CA and Paris, France, Aonix operates sales offices throughout North America and Europe in addition to offering a network of international distributors. For more information, visit www.aonix.com.

About ScopeSET[R]

ScopeSET is a software and systems engineering service and solution provider for customers in the technical software market, with a clear focus on the automotive and aerospace industry. The founders of ScopeSET are pioneers in OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and have a long history in developing, selling and supporting solutions in the software engineering environment market space. For more information, visit www.scopeset.de.

Aonix, ObjectAda, AonixADT are registered trademarks and trademarks of Aonix. Java[TM] and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Eclipse Foundation and Eclipse are trademarks of the Eclipse Foundation. All other tradenames and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. (c) 2007, Aonix, all rights reserved.