MetaCase Job Offer

MetaCase is looking for a Product Marketing & Sales Manager. If you feel you have the right entrepreneurial attitude and like to work in a dedicated team, looking to evangelize DSM and MetaEdit+ as the most advanced model-driven development solution, then I recommend you send in your application.

With MetaCase you get an opportunity to work with some of the industry's most recognized thought leaders in the field of model-based development. We don't need you to be an expert in this area, we DO need you to be genuinely interested and a fast learner with sharp thinking skills. You are skilled in relationship building and know how to "do a room" whenever a networking opportunity presents itself. You are a good negotiator, capable of seeing the big picture even in stressful situations and able to bring new ideas to our team to further promote our product.

If you believe you can provide a healthy contribution to MetaCase then we are ready to provide you with an inviting work environment, a fun team of people to work with and a competitive compensation package.

Send your application to jpt[at]metacase.com

Struggling with Microsoft's wording

GarethJ is wondering if MS's "DSL" tools might make people think MS is targeting textual languages. Remarkable.....especially when knowing that DSL's have for decades been textual languages. It remains a mystery to me why MS have not opted for the more correct "DSM languages", with the "M" representing Modeling. I suppose some marketing buff up in Redmond decided "DSL" to "sound" better and of course......it would save some ink.

Congratulations to Microsoft DSL Team

Jack, Steve, Gareth, Stuart, George, Jochen, Pedro, Alan, congratulations for the great work in bringing the Microsoft DSL tools this far! Your work means a lot to the category of model-driven development tools based on domain-specific modeling languages.

That the DSL tools have a lot of mindshare is shown for example by the article published yesterday on DevX that introduces the Software Factories approach by Edward Bakker and Christian Weyer. It puts the current (still immature) state of the Microsoft DSL tools in good perspective - don't get me wrong - I really think the DSL team has done an excellent job but there is still a long way to go, just like we at MetaCase had after releasing version 1.0 of MetaEdit+ back in 1993.

One of the problems described in the article deals with keeping generated artifacts and models in synch. It's inherent really to the horizontal focus the DSL's have in Microsofts view, this - in my humble opinion - will often (if not always) lead to an inability to generate full code from models, thus always leading to a chicken-and-egg situation: which one comes first. The article suggests ( I think correctly) that models to get the no.1 spot and proposes round-tripping as a solution. The problem it subsequently does not deal with is the difference in abstraction levels between the two. Steven gave an excellent explanation of this problem in his article on Codegeneration.net. Having to keep stuff in synch with each other always is a recipe for trouble, which is why code generation should aim at being complete.

Still, a big hats off for the DSL tools team at Microsoft, as the article shows, already some very cool things can be done with the current version.

"What Scale is worth the effort?"

In his blog "ISerializable", Roy Osherove talks about modeling with domain-specific languages and the ongoing "Software Factories" project in the healthcare sector. Besides the debate on whether the project is a failure or not - (Could it be the type of area Microsoft picked out? My thoughts earlier were that it seems that team Redmond is going far too generic with their Factories) - Roy wonders about "What scale is worth the effort?"

I believe it depends on many factors, such as complexity of the software you are creating, functionality, number and skill of the developers you have, number of possible variants or the amount of reuse of components and libraries you are planning (i.e. in product-platform-based approaches), and therefore it is difficult to answer.

Maybe we should look at the problem of "when does it make sense to apply domain-specific modeling" in the same way as "when does it make sense to apply modeling techniques?".

Currently many developers like it better to write code whenever they can do so, since it is faster than first modeling and then writing code. Complexity of the software forces you to make a model of it prior to coding but in itself thus forces you to solve the same problem on three levels: First in the problem domain, then in the domain of the modeling language and finally in the domain of the programming language. DSM attempts to bring the first two as close together as possible and automate the third step with generators. That way, they have to solve the problem only once. Much faster than writing it in code.

The other reason for modeling may be merely for documentation reasons where, as Roy mentions in his earlier post, models are usually out of date. If models however form the main artefacts of your development effort then both code and documentation will always be up to date as both are generated from the models.

Interview with Steven Kelly

Codegeneration.net has published an excellent interview with MetaCase CTO Steven Kelly about DSM, MDA, Software Factories and developing a meta-CASE, DSL tool like MetaEdit+.