Software Mumbles and Grumbles

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

This year’s Embedded Systems Show event will start in two days on Wednesday, October 17 in Birmingham, UK. If memory serves, this is the 4th year for the show. While ESS is an interesting event for anyone working in  the embedded world, what is of particular interest to me this year is the IET Technical Conference on Model-Driven Design for Software held on Wednesday the 17th. Companies dealing with software development for embedded systems seem to me to be some of the biggest receivers of the the benefits Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) has to offer. That is probably why so many embedded focused companies are turning to model driven approaches, such as DSM, and why this conference is being included at ESS.

 MetaCase CEO, Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, has been invited to give a presentation at the conference and will be doing so at 9:30 (GMT) on Oct 17 on DSM’s ability to generate full, production quality, code… If you’re in the area, and are able to attend, it will certainly be worth dropping by to hear him speak.