Panel: Evolution of Model-Driven Software Development

MDSD, DSLs, MDA, DSM, Software Factories - a whole bunch of terms, all basically addressing the same idea: using notations that are specific to a given domain to formally describe structures or behaviour in that domain in order to automatically "manufacture" software systems for that domain. But how will these approaches evolve over the next couple of years? What are some of the promising technologies? Which standards will most likely gain practical importance? In this session we try to look into the future and discuss promising innovations and developments in the field.

The panel, recorded at the 2007 edition of the Code Generation conference, entitled The next few years, was led by me and included Steven Kelly (Metacase), Andrew Watson (OMG), Laurence Tratt (Bournemouth University) and Krzysztof Czarnecki (University of Waterloo).  permalink    0 comments

 

Textual Modeling Framework Proposal Online

There are several ways of displaying and editing models. The two primary alternatives are graphical (or visual) concrete syntaxes and textual notations. EMP already has a solution to efficiently develop editors for graphical notations, namely GMF. However, in many situations, textual representations are much better suited. Therefore, the proposed TMF project will provide a means to efficiently create editors for custom textual notations.

Please go there, read it and provide feedback!

Labels: eclipse, openarchitectureware

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Models vs. Models

In the DSM workshop at this year's OOPSLA conference there was a presentation by a physical scientist who talked about model-based stuff. Of course he had a very different notion of what models are. For him models were essentially mathematical formalisms. The notation used for those models was also pretty obvious: mathematical notation.

What does this tell us? First of all, we have to be careful with the term "model". Other communities use it differently. Second, we can maybe learn something from the physical and mathematical communities, since they have been doing "model stuff" for quite a long time. Tools like Mathematica are powerful means to develop based on this paradigm. Maybe we should take another look...

(Of course I had been reminded of this mathematical/scientific notion of "model" before. My girlfriend actually works as an engineer in exactly this area. When we first met and then at some point got to talk about work, it took a while for us to understand each other :-))  permalink    0 comments