At the heart of Designer for Identity Manager is a strong object model that is based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework. This model uses the industry standard XMI format (XML Metadata Interchange Format) for storing objects and their relationships.
The main purpose of XMI is to enable easy interchange of metadata between modeling tools, that are based on the Object Management Group Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML) and between tools and metadata repositories, that are based on the OMG MetaObject Facility (MOF) in distributed heterogeneous environments. XMI integrates three key industry standards:
XML (Extensible Markup Language), a W3C standard
UML (Unified Modeling Language), an OMG modeling standard
MOF OMG modeling and metadata repository standard
The integration of these three standards into XMI integrates the best of OMG and W3C metadata and modeling technologies, allowing developers of distributed systems to share object models and other metadata. XMI, together with MOF and UML, forms the core of the OMG repository architecture that integrates object-oriented modeling and design tools with each other and with a MOF-based extensible repository framework.
Because Designer is based on this technology, you get the following benefits:
Published industry-standard APIs so that you can programmatically interact with the model.
A solid event-notification mechanism if the model ever changes.
All views, editors, and plug-ins are notified and in sync.
The ability to auto-generate Java code or UML from the model, or vice-versa.
Undo/redo the stack across all views, editors, and plug-ins that are in sync with the model.