The Metalevel

One day I had and keep having the feeling that mainstream tools for Code Generation are over-engineered and provides a lack of Separation on Concerns.

This was the motivation for me to build Essential as a MDE tooling for creating and maintain custom code generators. Time has arrived I need to get it back to life, refresh it and adapt to the new needs.

In the meantime, for the people interested in:

• see the new Essential Demo Video,
• try it,
• build something useful & fun, and
• send feedback!

The guys at the Eclipse Modeling Framework leaded by Ed Merks @edmerks are working hard in XCore to provide ECore models a textual syntax. This is a needed feature from a long time.

It was also a good surprise to see how XCore syntax is quite close to Essential Meta. This is good news again: interoperability between the Java modeling  side of world (EMF) and .NET modeling efforts with Essential are now simpler with the arrival of XCore.

As Meinte Boersma @miente37 comment on twitter: semicolons seems to be the main difference.

BTW, a new release of Essential with minimal bug fixing has been released (0.5.1). Try it out!

The recording of the Code Generation 2011 session about ‘Modelling the User Interface’ is finally available online at InfoQ.

For further details take a look to the slides and Conceptual User Interface Patterns.

During the video you can see a pair of demos:

•  Essential on action doing full UI inference and code generation
• and IO, the codename for a new proof of concept UI specification and WYSIWYG prototyping tool.

The Alt.NET Hispano group has published my VAN about Code generation with Essential. The recording was done in Spanish.

La comunidad Alt.NET Hispano ha publicado la VAN (desconferencia) sobre Generación de código con Essential que tuvimos el pasado dia 11 de junio. Si estás interesado en MDD, generación de código y como aplicarlo con Essential, este video grabado para la comunidad en español es un buen punto de partida.

Mi agradecimiento a Alt.NET Hispano por el interés en la materia y la invitación a divulgarlo.

Descarga directa del video (562 Mb).

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The Code Generation 2011 conference and the Language Workbenches Competition 2011 Workshop are quite close in the calendar.

I want to celebrate it with the MDD community sharing my work on Essential (a tool designed for acquiring speed with Model Driven Development). On 11th may 2011, version 0.4.44 has been released as the first public beta.

Essential is a meta-modeling and code generation tool providing specific DSLs to define and consume:

• Metamodels
• Models
• Templates (using StringTemplate) &
• Transformations (Model2Text and Model2Model)

Try it also with the sample projects created for the LWC 2011 challenge.

Code Generation 2011 is the leading European conference on modeling and code generation. It’s a great opportunity to meet with the experts in the field and share the latest research in the area.

The invited speakers this year are very, very interesting:

• Terrence Parr, well known by its work on teaching compiler construction and the great tools ANTLR and StringTemplate, and
• Ed Merks, the leader of the Eclipse Modeling Framework

As a novelty, previous to the conference itself the first edition of the Language Workbenches Competition will take place on May 24^th in the same venue.

In this edition, I will be there again, more active if ever, taking part with some activities:

• On May 24^th, presenting Essential in the scope of the Language Workbenches Competition
• On 25^th, presenting on Introducing Model Driven Software Development
• And, later on, taking part in the panel Build or Buy – who should develop and own your DSLs and generators? organized by Juha-Pekka Tolvanen from Metacase
• Finally, on 26^th, discussing about Modelling the User Interface

As always, I’m looking forward to meet again the code generation community.

Take a look to the full programme and don’t miss the chance.

See you in Cambridge!

As blogged before, at CG2010 a group of interest came up with a proposal for creating a Language Workbenches Competition and the first edition will be taking place in Cambridge May 24th, just before CG2011.

I submitted a proposal with Essential for participation in LWC11. It’s going to be a great forum for comparing language workbenches capabilities and the state of the art in the area. If interested, track the progress here LCW11.

During the last weeks I’ve been working a little, replacing the old Microsoft Oslo dependencies to MGrammar inside Essential to an alternative parsing solution. The MS Oslo and later SQL Server Modeling never passed from the CTP stage and finally were discontinued. Therefore, I couldn’t ship a product in such conditions and finally decided to change it.

The Hello World sample is a nice starting point to show the syntax and capabilities of every new language. This test is also useful for code generators and Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) also as a proof of concept.

Following this honorable tradition, I have created a video showing the capabilities of Essential: the tool I am working on for doing agile Model Driven Development.

In this 10 minutes video you will get a general idea of the DSL the language provides to create:

• metamodels
• models
• templates
• and control transformations

In order to see the details, jump to Vimeo, activate the High Definition mode (HD) and set full screen (sorry embebed version is not good enough).

Essential IDE – Hello World sample from Pedro J. Molina on Vimeo.

More info about it and 12 usage scenarios in the last Code Generation 2010 presentation about Tailored Code Generators.

Share your impressions!

I presented the following talk: DSL and tool support for Tailored Code Generators at Code Generation 2010, at Cambridge, UK on June 18th.

It also was the public presentation of Essential: the tooling supporting my approach for applying MDD. I got a very good feedback from the audience and receive many request to test the tool.

People interested in beta testing it can still enroll here.

Essential is going to be presented this week in Code Generation 2010 during the session DSL and tool support for building tailored code generators.

To celebrate this milestone and give the chance to have more people trying it, an early version is going to be released for the people interested in.

If this is your case, please enroll yourself using the evaluation request form.