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)

The main message of Egon was the need of formal specification and separation of specification from implementation. He showed how this can help in order to define the semantics. I was glad, that he confirmed some statements I’m discussing in my thesis.

Another positive message was that he is in touch with the OMG and SAP guys and his propositions are not only know in academia, but also in the standardization organization like OMG. He reported about some positive feedback from them, and spoke about some contributions to the BPMN 2.0.

I really enjoyed the session, because I like this old-school-style computer scientists. They spread their meta-thinking of a very high level and precision, that sometimes drives us progmatic guyes crazy. In the same time, they establish a natural meaning of quality and foster the reasoning about the topic, we are dealing with everyday…

( more photos in my photo stream)

Modelling BPEL Using Abstract State Machines

May 19th, 15:30 – 16:30
Ditze Hörsaal, Schwarzenbergstr. 95, 016 (AudiMax I building), 21073 Hamburg
by Prof. Egon Börger from the University of Pisa, Italy. ( original announcement)

It starts with an invited talk of a Prof. Dr. Egon Börger, famous computer science researcher, applying the concepts of Abstract State Mashines to the software and hardware design at Hamburg University of Technology.

Pragmatic Java EE 5 Hacking – Rethinking Best Practices

May 19th, 20:00 – 22:00
Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung (am Hauptbahnhof)
Kurze Mühren 6, 20095 Hamburg
by Adam Bien ( original announcement)

On the same day the meeting of the Java User Group Hamburg takes place at Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung. This time an invited talk on “Progmatic Java EE 5 Hacking” by Adam Bien. 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.

Java EE 5 is a revolution, not an evolution. Perhaps it goes not far enough – however some best-practices and patterns need to be pimped up, re-thought or pruned. After a short introduction into Java EE 5 / Java EE 6 (with a from scratch creation of a simple application with all “enterprise features”). The talk will provide the concept, patterns, best practices and discuss the context, advantages as well as shortcomings and provide suggestions / solutions for Java EE 5/6. This session will be interactive / openspace like. I’m really open for constructive criticism and will try to answer all questions with …code and real world context. Some upcoming Java EE 6 features will be presented as well.

So, see you there…