After coming back to Valencia from Montevideo, I’ve found the time to organize my ideas and explain as promised what I saw there.
As commented before, my expectatives were exceeded. The Genexus Event organized by Artech has a great quality level: more than 3.600 participants, having more than 120 sessions in tree days. I’m impressed! These kinds of things are not improvised, and the organization did a wonderful job for the event. Congrats!
In this post I will comment about the things I saw and liked (specially sharing the links to the videos and abundant material) and about my, now, better understanding of the tool Genexus.
Note: There is a some of material with on-line translation to English, the rest is only in original version (Spanish).
A year ago I met two Artech guys: G. Milano and A. Silva in the Code Generation 2008 conference and and interchanged nice points of views on MDD. Now I’ve been invited by Artech to give a talk about the state of the art of MDD in the XIX edition of the annual International Community Event of Genexus at Montevideo, Uruguay on 14-16 of September.
Artech is a Montevideo based company producing Genexus and DeKlarit. From the early 80s, Genexus allows to model and produce tailored full ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems based on models an full code generation.
Based in several custom DSLs, it allows to fully specify ERP systems for the domain of business and administration applications resolving persistence, business logic, user interface, and reporting.
Their approach is quite original because Genexus starts from collecting Users Data Views as the base model to derive a deterministic Entity-Relational data-model to drive the business information architecture.
Technology independence is one of their key features: it can generate Cobol, Java, C# or Ruby to cite a few of them. Changing the target technology is as fast as the time needed for regeneration and redeploy.
This community is new for me. I am more familiar with MDD in industrial software factories for middle to big sized customers based mainly in custom development and using object-oriented approaches. Anyway, I feel that we will have a lot of common ideas and principles because the main objective is basically the same: to put the machine to work for us.
I hope to learn a lot with the experience, meeting people and blog it back on my return.
