The Metalevel

Microsoft is making some noise about Oslo: the new MS approach to Model Driven Development (MDD for friends) and Domain Specific Languages (DSL).

As a practitioner and enthusiast of MDD and .NET I was looking forward to try it and see if there are nuts enough to justify the noise.

At Models Remixed you can find some nice marketing introductory videos about Model Driven & Oslo. By the way, if you take a look to the funny video about Modeling through the ages just remember that the second scene about humans and T-Rex is purely fiction: humans & T-Rex were never concurrent in time. Fortunately T-Rex disappeared a long time before humans get off the trees. More… »

Code Generation 2009 is now open for submissions till January 16th 2009.

Code Generation is the conference focused on MDD/MDA & Code Generation.

If you are interested in the area and something to show to the community do not miss the opportunity to join us in Cambridge on June!

XML 10th birthday

This year we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of language that has already changed our lives quite fast. In February 1998, the W3C published the specs for XML 1.0. Nevertheless, XML is a bit older to tell the true: SGML was it original father two years before, in 1996.

After the XML adoption, the way we work with data was never be the same again. It’s incredible to see how fast we have adopted it as it was one of our native tongue.

To commemorate the event, I will recommend you reading a nice article about the abuse of XML called “XML Fever” published on Communication of the ACM vol 51. issue 7 (Erik Wilde & Robert J. Glushko).

More… »

Code Generation 2008 Conference was held in Cambridge the last week of June. In this second edition, I have to say that the content has been even better that the first edition in 2007.

First line speakers in the Model Driven Development, MDA & code generation were present showing their current work and success case studies. If you are interested in these topics, this is for sure the place to stay tuned.

One of my strong impression shared with other participants is that, year by year, MDD approaches have more success cases & real numbers to share and persuade customers & colleagues about the feasibility of MDD approaches to software development.

Grady Booch one time said:

The entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction (abstraction is the primary way we as humans deal with complexity).

Model Execution is clearly the next step for raising the abstraction level.

The technology for MDD is starting to be mature: Microsoft DSL Tools, Eclipse EMF/GMF proyects, XML, parsers an template engines are ready for creating production systems.

In this second edition of CG08 I was involved in the Program Committee. My two cents to CG08 came in form of:

• an experience report: MDD: Models, frameworks & code generation: some experiences building business software
• and two Goldfish bowls (thanks to the organizers for inviting me to participate):
  • Rating MDx: where are we and how far do we have to go? (Organized by Matthew Fowler /  NT/e)
  • Modelling Standards: what exists, what’s missing and what failed? (Organized by Bernhard Merkle / SICK A.G.)

Slides & audio recorded materials of CG08 will be posted soon here.

Finally, I found the time to start my blog: The Metalevel. I will post some thoughts to share mainly focused, I hope, on the following topics: Software Architecture, Software Engineering, MDD, modeling, meta-modeling, DSL, code generation, user interfaces, etc.

Thanks for reading! Your comments are more than welcome!
Pedro J.