Articles on DSLs and Generative Development Approaches

It seems that others are coming to many of the same conclusions that we have reached concerning modeling languages and development approaches in which they can be utilized effectively. In their article here in David Frankel’s excellent MDA Journal, a team of IBM DE’s and Grady Booch lay out their manifesto for MDA. This is a nice article, but we have been struck by the convergence of ideas, and the acknowledgement that families of domain specific modeling languages are the way to support modern development approaches. On a slightly different but related note, an article on https://codegeneration.net involved an interview with Sergey Dmitriev, the CEO of JetBrains who makes development tools for Java. This article is also about DSLs and their role in development, and makes references to the seminal work of our friend Krzysztof Czarnecki of Waterloo University, in Canada, one of the authors of Generative Programming (Addison-Wesley, 2000), a classic text on the topic, who has also been a strong influence on our work on DSLs and Software Factories.

To round of this posting of news, another press story ran last week in SD Times highlighting our modeling strategy. At the moment you can read this article here. I think it did a fair job of positioning DSLs alongside UML 2.0, and even contained a quote from Cris Kobryn of Telelogic who admitted, apparently, that UML 2.0 requires “liposuction”!