Archive for the ‘mdsd’ Category

November 6th, 2008 by HeSoK

On October 15th to 17th the Workshop on MDSD Today 2008 took place in the Nordakademie Elmshorn near Hamburg. This workshop was actually the sequel to two different workshops which were led by Frank Zimmermann (Nordakademie) and Simon Zambrovski (TUHH) the year before. For this years event, Peter Friese (Itemis) from Itemis joined the two for organizing the Workshop.

The workshop was divided into three parts: Day 1: Management Day, Day 2: Professional Day (Modeling Projects and Tutorials) and Day 3: Professional Day (Generator Tutorials). (See also MDSD08).

The first day was dominated by excellent key-note speeches given by the EMF lead Ed Merks Ph.D. and SAPs Dr. Axel Uhl. Ed was talking about misconceptions in understanding and applying model driven techniques. Axel on the other hand talked about the challenges that still lay on our way and need to be overcome. He discussed for example the different benefits and drawbacks of using different sorts of DSL (e.g. non-textual / textual) with respect to storing them in repositories, merging and refactoring (i.e. general tool-support). Birger Garbe and Stefan Reichert (both Lufthansa Systems consultants) talked about their experiences in applying MDSD in the field. Chances and riscs were explained and how they managed to overcome those riscs. Thomas Stahl of b+m Informatik gave a talk about how MDSD, BPM and SOA fit together, unfortunately he couldn’t give is planned speech “Experiences of 10 years of MDSD”. As one of the authors of the model-driven software development book and with the experience background he has, this would be have been clearly very interesting. The speech he gave instead was also interesting but took little different directions.

The second day was filled with two different tracks one could attend. One covered contributions coming from the fields of research and the industry. And in the other one Ed Merks gave an intro to the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). After that, Ralf Möller of the Eclipse Foundation talked about innovation networks. The afternoon was filled with a tutorial on how to generate graphical editors using the GMF. The tutorial was given by Robert Wloch who jumped in for Jan Köhnlein (both itemis) who unfortunately got sick.

The third and last day was filled with a tutorial on xText, which was given by Peter Friese and Sven Efftinge (both itemis). Later Arno Haase (independant consultant) tought the audience how to do model-to-model and model-to-code transformations.

Summing up this was a very, very interesting event where the cremé dé la cremé of MDSD gathered and where people had the chance to ask, learn and get to know each other. Not only the speeches and tutorials were very interesting, funny but the overall event had socially a nice friendly touch. Some further pictures can be found in the FlickR gallaery.

The Workshop Proceedings can be obtained at amazon:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on MDSD Today 2008 (engl.)

Ed Merks new book will be published sometime in the beginning of 2009, here is a link to the “old” (but still good) one:

Eclipse Modeling Framework (engl.)

Also I would like to mention the book by Arno Haase, Markus Völter, Thomas Stahl, Sven Efftinge:

Modellgetriebene Softwareentwicklung ( english version)

Posted in eclipse, mdsd, technology | 2 Comments »

September 10th, 2008 by Simon Zambrovski

The holiday season is over and we can enjoy an event every week. After Maven 2, Eclipse Stammtisch and reasoning on modularity an event on enterprise systems can be visited. It seems that after the last visit on Java EE 5 Hacking Adam want to tell something on Java EE 6 Hacking…

This session will be interactive / openspace like. He will walk through the new EJB 3.1 APIs and explain some interesting stuff as well. It is the logical conduction of the first JUG HH session in May 2008.

Location: Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung (Hamburg Hauptbahnhof), Kurze Mühren 6, 20095 Hamburg

Date and Time: 16.09.2008, 20:00
Topic: Productive Java EE 6 – Rethinking Best Practices And Bashing On Patterns, Cluster One

Abstract: Java EE 6 is great, but many questions like:

• Are DAOs dead?
• Do JSF really suck?
• Are anemic JPA-entities a best practice?
• Are XML deployment descriptors legacy?
• Are EJBs lightweight?
• How to test EJBs?
• Is layering an antipattern?
• Do we need factories?
• How to integrate with RESTFul services?
• Is it possible to deploy EJBs into a …WAR?
• Are “plain old web containers” dead?
• Services or Objects – what is the way to go?

still remain open. These and many other questions will be discussed interactively with …code.

Speaker: Adam Bien

About the speaker: Java Champion Adam Bien is a self-employed consultant, lecturer, software architect, developer, and author in the enterprise Java sector in Germany who implements Java technology on a large scale. He is also the author of several books and articles on Java and J2EE technology, as well as distributed Java programming. His books include J2EE Patterns, J2EE HotSpots, Java EE 5 Architectures, Enterprise Architectures, Enterprise Java Frameworks, SOA Expert Knowledge, and Struts, all published in German.

As BEA technical director, Bien is also a member of the NetBeans Dream Team; an Expert Group member of the Java Community Process for EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, and Java EE 6; and involved in embedded Java, Grid, and P2P technology. He currently works as an architect and developer in several J2EE-Java EE Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and EAI component architecture projects for the Java EE platform and .NET.

Posted in announce, enterprise systems, java, mdsd, tools | 3 Comments »

December 18th, 2007 by HeSoK

At the Eclipse DemoCamp we had the opportunity to present certain aspects of our work. Our talk concentrated on building a repository for GMF based diagram editor models. The problem there is, that GMF makes assumptions about the underlaying model which had to be worked around. In the following slides the essence of the steps necessary are explained.

Presentation Slides

 Thanks to http://www.loroma.com/ for creating and cutting the video. It is dark, but you can hear our voices, even though the presentation is in German.

Posted in eclipse, java, mdsd, technology | No Comments »

December 18th, 2007 by Simon Zambrovski

Yesterday, the first Hamburger Eclipse DemoCamp took place. About fifty participants and eight speakers met in the nice Spanish restaurant Aqui in Schanzen-District, just a step away from the Headquaters of Gentleware AG. The event was, what it should be – a local exchange of experience and know-how in the area of Eclipse. Because of the interests of Gentleware, b+m Informatik AG and itermis AG, the session was not just Eclipse-generic, but focused on MDSD topics. I liked the fact that the participants quickly build a homogenous group – all of them had some experience in PDE, EMF, etc. Amazing demo has been shown by Frank Zimmerman, who used some MDSD techniques to program the Lego Robot. A very nice start event, hopefully it can become a tradition. The photos are available in a FlickR’s Photo Set.

Posted in eclipse, java, mdsd, technology | No Comments »