Monday, October 23, 2006
OOPSLA II: Sunday
Today in the morning I was in the workshop for domain-specific modeling (DSM), organized by JP Tolvanen and Jeff Gray (I was on the comittee). The morning was paper presentations. Here are some noteworthy things:- Do you know Jos Warmer? He's a well known UML and OCL guy. He said he doesn't like UML for MDSD :-) Just thought I'd let you know ...
- There was also a presentations where the presenter talked about building a DSM infrastructure with MS DSL Tools. Transformations were to be built using C#, References among models were done using name-equivalence, the generators generated code only from one model at a time. This sounds actually quite simplistic. In general, I thought that many of the practitioner report position papers were relatively simple systems. I don't want to badmouth anything of this. However, I think that advanced concepts are not very widely spread. Specifically, many people build their tools from scratch and reimplement (more or less round) wheels over and over again.
- After the practitioner papers, the workshop moved on to discuss the "theory and philosophy" papers. There were two quite good papers on metamodel composition and on the relationship between metamodels, ontologies and semantics. Seems like there's a lot of research to do. Other problems of current modeling infrastructures, as it turns out, are scalable repositories as well as model paritioning and cross-references. That's some of the same challenges we'd identified at the Eclipse Summit Modeling Symposium.
- Then it became bad. There was a presentation by a guy from a german university (I am not going to mention his name or the university). He talked about some "research results". And I got really frustrated. Why? Because he presented as research results stuff that we had literally written in the MDSD book 1.5 years ago. Don't these people read literature before they do research? For example, they "researched" the roles that developers have to play in an MDSD project: DSL developer, f/w developer, app developer! Who'd have thought that. Also, he talked about "agile DSM" and basically repeated the arguments we made in that section in the book. Now, why do I write this here? It's not that I am angry because we've "invented" these things in the MDSD book. But, shouldn't universities, before resarching something, check whether this stuff had already been described somewhere? Why present something as research results that is already state-of-the-art in industry? I hink research dollars and euros should be spent for really hard and novel issues, and not on reiterating on trivialities!
In the afternoon I gave my GPCE tutorial on Eclipse and oAW together with Arno. Went well, I think. We then got stuck talking about stuff with Michael Stal and Krzysztof Czarnecki... went to have dinner in town ... and then got to bed at 2200 ... jetlagged :-) permalink
