Software Mumbles and Grumbles

In a about 2 hours, Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, CEO of MetaCase, will be delivering the first of 2 talks at Dr. Dobb’s Architecture and Design World conference in Chicago. This first talk, Building DSM Languages with Full Code Generation, begins today at 1:30 (local time) and lasts until 5:00. The second talk is scheduled for tomorrow, 22 July, from 3:30 to 5:00 and is entitled Moving from Coding to Model-Driven Development. Both talks should be must sees for anyone interested in DSM or MDSD.

Tomorrow is miniSPA 2008, in London. It’s a free, one-day conference containing the highlighted talks from the main SPA conference earlier in the year. MetaCase consultant Risto Pohjonen will be presenting a tutorial from 14:45 to 16:00 on using DSM for full code generation.

MetaCase has again been named to the SD Times 100 list of the most influential organizations in the software development industry. This is the second year in a row that MetaCase has won the award in the Modeling category, and is a strong sign of the positive direction in which DSM is currently moving.

For more information visit www.metacase.com/news/sdtimes100-2008.html

Those of you looking to step up your level of understanding regarding DSM and MDD should consider attending Software Architect 2008 in London, UK from 3-5 June. MetaCase’s CTO, Dr. Steven Kelly,  will be present a full-day pre-conference workshop on the 3rd entitled “Building Domain-Specific Modelling Languages with Full Code Generation“. The workshop is targeted at those with an intermediate or advanced understanding of DSM; architects and team leaders with an interest in model-based software development should seriously think of attending.

There will also be two additional presentations on the 5th if you are not able to attend the full-day workshop. Times and links to further information can be found on MetaCase’s website http://www.metacase.com/fairs.html .

I came across an interesting post from Jeffrey Ricker which offers and introductory discussion on MDD. Many of the benefits of MDD were well presented, but I had to disagree with the fundamental assertions that Eclipse is God’s gift to MDD.

Eclipse has helped increase the exposure and profile of MDD (there are a lot of Eclipse users), but it is far from being the best platform for MDD. The author justifies his view by broadly dismissing all proprietary MDD tools on the grounds that companies are not interested in proprietary tools. In my experience, companies are looking for the solution that offers them the best results/value and that they can depend on. There is no doubt that MetaEdit+ is technologically superior to any of the MDD tools offered for Eclipse, but that is my opinion. The proof is in the pudding, and if you look at the productivity and quality improvements achieved by MetaEdit+ customers, and compare that to Eclipse users, you’ll see why I am confident in making that statement.

On the other criteria, dependability, MetaEdit+ also has a striking advantage. Eclipse’s entry into the domain-specific modeling arena has been fairly recent, whereas MetaEdit+ has been used successfully since the early 90’s. Besides that, with MetaEdit+ there is a brilliant team of developers that are there to support customers every step of the way. With the ability to easily export all data to XML or to integrate with other tools via the SOAP based API, any residual fear that could potentially come from working with a proprietary tool are eliminated.

The European Conference on Model Driven Architecture Foundations and Applications (ECMDA 2008) will be held in Berlin from 09-12 June. This is the fourth year the conference, but this year seems to be blurring the line on the general-purpose vs. domain-specific positions.

MetaCase’s CEO has been invited to give a special, full-day tutorial on the benefits of Domain-Specific Modeling. It’s not what you might expect to hear at a conference on MDA, but I guess even the diehard MDA supporters recognize a good thing when they hear it… Just one more sign of the continuing decline in UML, and the rising influence of DSM.

Early bird pricing is available through Thursday, 15 May and will save you about 15% of the regular price.

Monday, 9 June 2008 (full day tutorial)

Domain-Specific Modeling for Full Code Generation

The 5th annual Software Engineering Today (SET) conference will begin tomorrow in Zurich, Switzerland. The 2-day event seems to address a wide variety of topics, from management issues to particular technologies, so I would expect the attendee profile to be quite mixed. Talks are offered in both German and English with 4 separate keynotes (plenty for a 2-day event) from Eric Evans, Stefan Arn, Naomi Karten, and Horst Zuse. MetaCase’s CEO will be giving a presentation on Tuesday which offers a roadmap on how to change to a MDD approach from manual coding. The weather should be sunny and warm (20°C / 68°F), so no excuses not to make the trip

Tuesday 6 May (14:00 - 14:45)
Moving from Coding to Model-Driven Development

Following a recent web meeting, Contributing Editor Martin Heller of InfoWorld posted his thoughts on MetaCase’s MetaEdit+, Microsoft’s DSL Tools, and DSM in general. I let out an audible laugh when I read his opening comments on the flood of demo requests he received following in recent review of Rhapsody—knowing full well that I was one of the guilty parties. But, by the sound of his comments, I think that he found the webmeeting worth his time. At the very least, the webmeeting seems to have helped to clear up some misconceptions that he (and I know many others have) may have regarding the time it takes to create a DSM language.

For me, the most significant part of the message was what Mr. Heller says at the end. He says that he had tried out Microsoft’s DSL Tools in the past and “found them to require a lot of work—weeks—to build an effective model.” From other stories I’ve heard regarding DSL Tools, these ‘weeks’ often slip into ‘months’. Mr. Heller goes on to say that he “assumed that this was the state of the art,” but after having seen the MetaEdit+ demonstration he sees that this is not the case.

He closes with the quote from Laurent Safa of Matsushita/Panasonic who had the following to say about MetaEdit+:

“I could define a domain-specific language in about six hours — design, testing and one failed trial included.”

The full posting is available at:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/stratdev/archives/2008/04/dsm_tool_offers.html

I’m happy to report that MetaCase has released a new version of MetaEdit+, the world’s leading Domain-Specific Modeling tool. The new version provides new language definition tools for better control with an intuitive new interface. Reverse engineering capabilities are also available–allowing expert developers to define how legacy code should be use and integrated with the models.

The new version also includes a number of new example languages (e.g. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), insurance product specifications, automotive infotainment systems, home automation controllers) to help new users in getting started.

More details are available on the MetaCase website.

This weekend (29-30 March) is the 7th International Workshop on Graph Transformation and Visual Modeling Techniquesin Budapest, Hungary. It’s more academic in nature than the model driven development events I usually blog about, but I wanted to mention this one as MetaCase’s CEO, Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, will be delivering the keynote address entitled “Domain-Specific Modeling in Practice”.

Some of the other content of the event does sound fairly interesting for DSM enthusiasts. Raising abstraction is of course key in DSM, and seems to be a partial focus of the conference. Other model based approaches will also be presented, e.g. the expected UML and model-to-model transformation talks, but hopefully many of the other presentations will recognize that there is a better way.