Raising your level of abstraction

In the last week of June, the Homerton College in Cambridge, UK, was home of the Code Generation 2008 conference. The aim was to bring together experts, developers, architects and people who are trying to get to know more about the concepts of model-driven software development (MDSD). This software development paradigm has its roots in software product line engineering, which is the discipline of designing and building families of applications for a specific purpose or market segment, through the creation of domain-specific models.

The conference had a quite diverse team of speakers: people from the Microsoft world, including Jean-Marc Prieur and the well-known Steve Cook, some guys from the Eclipse Modeling Project, other relevant players in this market like MetaCase and NT/e, and some academic researchers like Eelco Visser from the Delft University of Technology.

During the quite intensive three days of conference, we had the opportunity to listen, learn, discuss, meet great people and have a lot of fun. The main topics were textual and graphical DSLs, product lines and quality-of-service constrained software, with great presentations that should soon be available at the conference’s website.

The Microsoft approach provides a lot of off-the-shelf features and a well-defined roadmap to get you up to speed fairly quickly. By the way, in the French-speaking environment Microsoft seems to be quite ahead with an active community of developers. On the other hand, the Eclipse tools (and the open-source initiatives in general) are more flexible (and you don’t have to worry about licenses), but have a steeper learning curve and it’s sometimes hard to find out what’s the best approach to take midst so many options. Other commercial solutions seemed to be a little bit outdated – as one of the speakers mentioned, it’s hard to follow all the emerging frameworks and new technologies and be able to generate code for most of them – and that’s one of the reasons why JeeWiz, for example, just went open-source.

MDSD is certainly a hot topic in the ever-changing world of Web 2.0, as it allows companies to respond more dynamically to market changes and we’ll certainly continue to keep an eye on it and share our impressions here.