Software Mumbles and Grumbles

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.

As I mentioned in a previous post, MetaCase’s Drs. Kelly and Tolvanen, have published a new book on DSM, appropriately named “Domain-Specific Modeling: Enabling Full Code Generation.” The reason for this post is that I wanted to also mention that there is now a website for the book www.dsmbook.com available for those who want to get a full overview of the content, as well as some background on the authors.

I already stated my positive opinion about the book, but I’m happy to say that the early feedback I am hearing has also been extremely positive–very good exposure for the DSM community as a whole. This book should really help to open a lot of eyes to the potential of DSM.

Software Practice Advancement 2008 starts this Sunday in Bedfordshire England. Keynotes for the event are Michael Feathers (Object Mentor Inc.) and Dr. L Peter Deutsch (Ghostscript).

For those of you interested in DSM, there are a few presentations not to miss:

Monday 17 March 10:00-13:00
Domain-Specific Modeling for Full Code Generation
Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen

Monday 17 March 15:30-16:45
Domain Specific Languages: Design and Evolution
Peter Bell

Another promising session (non-DSM) is Mark Dalgarno’s talk on preventing architecture decay.
Tuesday 18 March 14:45-17:45
When good architecture goes bad

Enjoy the show.

It’s always a nice when I run across software development gurus that are praising the merits of Domain-Specific Modeling and Languages—particularly when they are converts. Over the weekend I spotted a posting from Ivar Jacobson that was just that. As most of you are probably aware, he is one of the original creators of the UML. In the posting, Mr. Jacobson emphasizes the importance of reuse and comments that domain-specific languages (not UML) are the key. This is the message that DSM tool providers (e.g. MetaCase) have been saying for years now and it sure is great that even the founders of the UML are stating the same.

http://ivarjacobson.wordpress.com/2004/02/08/software-reuse/

DevWeek 2008 is less than a month away. The speakers for this year’s show look strong (http://www.devweek.com/speakers/) and really seems to have something for everyone.

10-14 March
Barbican Centre
London, UK

MetaCase’s CEO, Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen,  will be presenting on 12 March (14:00-15:30).

http://www.devweek.com/sessions/conference2.asp

If you are interested in setting up a time to meet with Dr. Tolvanen either before or after the event, let me know (james@metacase.com).

Here are the photos from OOP 2008, Munich, Germany, I promised in the last posting.

Down one of the aisles

MetaCase booth

Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, explaining how to create domain-specific modeling languages