The Metalevel

Once again, back home after the most exciting till date edition of the Code Generation conference in the latest years. The co-allocation of the Language Workbenches Competition has been a great incentive to attract all of us to join and present alternatives to a great challenge in the domain of modeling and code generation.

In this long post, I want to share my personal view about these days, and for sure, take note it could be partial and subjective. So, be kind to review also the comments as seen by others like Johan den Haan, Markus Völter, Angelo Hulshout, Marco Bambrilla, or Mariot Chauvin to cite a few and more expected to come. Find the majority of the pointers at the http://modeldrivensoftware.net

In this edition, the conference has been deeply covered via twitter using #cg2011 and #lwc11

As expected, I will be only be able to comment about the sessions I personally have attended. Running three tracks in parallel always force us to choose one and miss two other great sessions.

More… »

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.

Angelo Hulshout has disclosed the list of participants taking part in the first Language Workbenches Competition to be organized on May 24th, at Cambrigde, UK. Just before the Code Generation annual conference.

Finally, I will also be there presenting Essential as a solution to the challenge. It’s a nice excuse to go there, just in case!

Now I can hear in the background the sound of knives being sharpened, nevertheless with an Olympic spirit. }:)

If you want to see the State of the Art of the next generation Software Engineering tools in action, don’t miss the opportunity and join us. See you there!

Language Workbenches, as defined originally by Martin Fowler, are tools aiming to cope with DSL creation and code generation to increase the level of abstraction of software development.

Currently, the main efforts on MDD, MDE, MDSD (model-driven-whatever you prefer…) are focused in the development of this kind of tools perceived as a hot research area for Software Engineering.

In this scenarion, Cambridge, at Code Generation 2010 was the perfect place for sparkling the idea of promoting a contest to show and compare the advances of different language workbenches.

The Language Workbench Competition born with the objective to serve as a point of comparison between different tools in this exciting and fast moving area.

The competition is now open to the public. So anyone interested can enroll and implement the proposed challenge just published.

On the other hand, if you want to know more about Language Workbenches, modeling and code generation add this page to you bookmarks and come back in few months to see some proposals.

The promoters of the idea are: Markus Völter, Eelco Visser, Steven Kelly, Angelo Hulshout, Jos Warmer, Bernhard Merkle, Karsten Thoms and myself.

So this a call to arms but with sportsmanship!

Angelo and Markus has already started the calling.