Terminology Hell, Pt. 2

It is getting even worse. Yesterday I listened to a podcast-delivered recording of a JavaPolis session on Agile Model-Driven Development by Scott Ambler.

Now, there might be some disagreement in the MD(S)D community about what "model-driven" means in detail. But the community does agree on the following: MD(S)D is about somehow (semi-)automatically generating stuff from (semi-)formal models.

Scott did not talk about that. He just talked about models as thinking tools, about documentation, white board sketches, agility, testing and things. Now, all of this is important, but this is not MD(S)D - agile or not. The only thing he said in the direction of MD(S)D was that people who think MDA works should stop smoking marihuana.

Again: I think that is a problem for our community that we cannot even agree on the essence of what terms mean, and that people "misuse" terms to get a piece of the hype.  permalink    1 comments

 

Web 2.0 - really good video

(via Lawrence Lessig) I am not usually forwarding stuff that I read on other blogs, but this video that explains web 2.0 is *really* good. Go watch it Larry Lessig's page. It was created by Michael Wesch, an assistant Cultural Anthropology Prof at Kansas State University.  permalink    0 comments

 

Terminology Hell

I am sometimes really angry about the way our community makes life hard for themselves. We seem unable to agree on a common terminology. Take SOA for example. I think everybody knows that it is really hard to give a concrete definition of SOA. But I think the community agrees that SOA has to do with things such as

• large systems
  
• enterprise
  
• integration
  
• processes
  
• loose coupling
  
• reuse
  
• contracts (i.e. more than interface signatures)
  
• organization of enterprises
  
• etc.
  

If I then hear a talk about OSGi where the presenter suggests that OSGi an SOA platform than I really feel fooled! Yes, in OSGi there's the concept of a service. It's basically a Java interface, with pluggable implementations. But none of the SOA characteristics mentioned above fits in, except maybe for the loose coupling.

Although I understand that everybody wants a share of the SOA hype, I think it would be useful to agree on some terms, at least on the level of the characteristics above, and then not explicitly mess everything up by calling everything an SOA.

Our community and profession is really far away from anything "engineering", if we can't even agree on certain fundamental terms and then stick to it!  permalink    10 comments

 

Xweave - the Model Weaver

Long time no blog ... ... ... Just thought I'd let you know that the paper on model weaving with XWeave (which I wrote tgether with Iris Groher) has been accepted to the Aspect Oriented Modelling Workshop at the AOSD 2007 conference. XWeave will become part of oAW once we finish it :-). Read the paper here.

Labels: eclipse

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