Steve Cook's WebLog

Grady has blogged about Microsoft’s position on UML . His article is a masterpiece of technopolitical spin. He says Microsoft “rejects UML”, and of course we don’t; as my colleague Alan Cameron Wills says, “we don’t want to limit ourselves to UML as a...

Today at OOPSLA I participated in a panel session about MDA . We had an interesting debate about what MDA actually is. I suggested that MDA proponents fall into the following three camps. 1. The UML PIM camp: MDA involves the use of UML to build Platform...

When UML 2.4 was released we discovered an issue that meant it was impossible to interchange StructuredActivityNodes reliably. StructuredActivityNodes are executable nodes in an activity diagram that are also groups.  UML 2.4 doesn’t specify clearly...

Recent postings have talked about “semantics” of graphical languages. When I was involved in UML development this word caused a lot of argument and confusion. In my view, it goes like this. A graphical language has three primary aspects: concrete syntax...

In my last two posts I outlined the basic ideas of Parts, Ports and Connectors as they appear in Structured Classes. This time I’m going to discuss Components, and in particular the changes we’ve been making in UML 2.3 so that the Components chapter is...

At this link you can download a “paper panel” about the pros and cons of UML 2.0, as published in the Software and Systems Modeling Journal. Participants Steve Mellor , Joaquin Miller , Bran Selic and me; moderated by Brian Henderson-Sellers. The first...

I told Stefan Tilkov that speaking as an ex-participant of the OMG circus I particularly enjoyed the following paragraph from his blog : So in the end, it seems to come down to MOF in its sort-of-working semi-compatible non-standardized incarnation (...

Neil Davidson emailed me this interesting comment about my SPA talk. I fully agree with him that we're always going to need craftsmen to produce software, and that the tools they use will change. As with all analogies, the analogy between maturity in...

I’m just back from an intense week in Redmond . A few days before going I gave another talk, this time to the British Computer Society’s Advanced Programming Group. During the talk I was asked what I meant by “metadata”. I realized that these days I use...

We’ve received a couple of questions on the DSL Tools Forum which I thought I’d expand upon here. The questions are: - Why don’t we use UML to define our metamodels? - Why don’t we use MOF to define our metamodels? To answer these effectively, it’s...

Harry Pierson points out a very interesting post from Juha-Pekka Tolvanen reporting on Grady Booch's OOPSLA panel comments about throwing UML models away. Are we achieving a consensus?

The new release of our DSL Tools is available now, as announced by Gareth.

I’m back in the office after travelling to Switzerland to speak about Software Factories at TechDays . I had some very interesting conversations there with Ralf Westphal , who showed me his work on adding textual Domain Specific Languages to Visual Studio...

This article on TheServerSide.Net gives a good perspective about what is really happening with MDA .

The next big step for software development is “Language Engineering”. As well as our own work on software factories , you can see this awareness emerging in other places eg this recent post by Martin Fowler . What do I mean by Language? - look at Alan...

Jack Greenfield has posted a comprehensive response to Tad Anderson .

At this link is an interesting article about how Macaw, a System Integrator based in the Netherlands, is implementing the software factory vision. They are supporting VS2003 and VS2005, and taking a very pragmatic approach. No graphical modelling tools...

Finally we have completed all of the technical processes for creating UML 2.4. Now it just has to go through the OMG’s voting procedures and, assuming it passes, will be formally issued as the latest UML specification. We’ve given a lot of attention to...

Harry has hit the nail on the head . Again .

See the DSL Tools web page for details on the latest preview of the DSL Tools. Here's what the link says: About the Latest CTP The latest CTP (in the June CTP of Visual Studio 2005 SDK) brings the Domain-Specific Language tools much closer to their...

My colleague Alan Cameron Wills makes several excellent points about why not to base domain specific languages on UML . I hope Grady Booch reads this. There really is very little common semantic ground between a conveyer belt and anything in UML.

Keith Short’s blog has a report on some of our team’s experiences at OOPSLA this year. I’m back in the UK now, recovering from the jetlag. One aspect of our Software Factories tutorial which I think was particularly interesting was the use of Business...

It's almost a month since I posted anything - we've been very busy working on the next version of the DSL tools, which will appear quite soon. Last week I spent a day at the SPA conference which was a nice opportunity to meet up with some old friends...

We’re currently doing a major cleanup and revision of the APIs of the DSL Tools. An aspect of this is a systematic renaming so that the API is a better match to the concepts we are dealing with. One thing we decided to do is get rid of the Meta… prefix...

I spoke a few days ago at the British Computer Society's SPA Group Architecture day. There were several interesting talks about MDA and other topic, which you can find at http://bcs-oops.org.uk/mdaprog.html . The SPA group used to be called the OOPS group...