Proposal is intended to simplify app development See correction below.The reuse of existing software development assets would become easier under a proposal to be pondered by the Object Management Group next week.The OMG is expected to review the “Reusable Asset Specification” (RAS) at a meeting in London next week, said Grant Larsen, model-driven development specialist at IBM Rational, who has been active in development of the specification. Following the review, the proposal will go through a 90-day comment period, before entering the OMG adoption voting process. The genesis of the specification was that with the downturn in the economy, customers wanted to leverage existing software investments, Larsen said.“What we found was we needed to come to some agreements on packaging the artifacts coming out of software development, such as models or source code or JAR (Java Archive) files,” said Larsen. The specification defines a software asset and endorses use of metadata captured in XML. It is intended to give predictability to software assets by providing a common structure for describing the assets. IBM Rational already supports the specification in tools such as its Rational XDE tool, Larsen said. The specification previously had been the domain of the RAS Consortium. Correction: This story as originally posted contained incorrect information. The RAS proposal is currently being reviewed by the OMG but has not yet been adopted. Software Development