OOPSLA VI: Thursday and Wrap up

Thursday started with the tutorial on Model-Driven Development of Distributed Systems that I delivered together with Doug Schmidt. The tutorial went quite well - as usual, we had too many slides :-). However, after the break the power went away, the lights went dark and a fire alarm was sounding. Everybody had to leave the building. After a while, we were allowed back in, but there still was no power, so we had to continze the tutorial without the video projector. So, we just continued talking, with the people looking at the handouts. This was the firs time that handouts were actually useful :-)

In the afternoon I went to a couple of GPCE sessions, where, among other things, Frederic Jouault (in case you read this, Frederic, sorry for omitting the accents :-)) showed the TCS tooling, basically an xText++, i.e. a way to define textual concrete syntax for existing meta models. Very nice.

I would probably have been much more enthusiastic in my description of TCS if it hadn't been for a tool called SAFARI. SAFARI was demoed later, in it basically a framework and generator for building languages and the necessary support infrastructure on top of Eclipse. Based on a grammar definition and a set of wizards, a complete IDE infrastructure is generated. This was *very* impressive. The tool is developed by IBM research. It's currently not yet open source, but they will open source it by mid 2007. This looks very very interesting. Arno, Frederic and myself have been talking to the guys behing the tool to discuss some prospective integration with the Eclipse modeling world. It's obviously quite early wrt. to SAFARI and modeling, but we'll keep them on the radar and make sure there will be some integratioin once SAFARI is open source.

In the evening, I had dinner in a great seafood restaurant with a sizable portion of the MDD/DSM/GP community. It was great fun, and the food was outstanding!

So, to wrap up: although much criticized recently, OOPSLA is still a conference that is very much worth going to. Nowhere else will I meet so many colleagues and friends, especially wrt to the MDD community. Everybody is there, the GME people, Metacase, Eclipse folks, people from Microsoft as well as the guys from INRIA. There have been many inspiring and fruitful discussions. So, thanks to all of you for these discussions, the fun, and the conference in general. I am happy to be part of this community. See you next year :-)  permalink