The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

re: The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

Austin Lamb — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:50:07 GMT

I've applied to join the EFx Workspace - I'd love to see what you're doing with factories. I've been providing some input on, and am currently using in production, the Service Factory and Smart Client Software Factory. I'm also using Project Glidepath, another factory coming out.

I think you're the first I've seen to use GAT and DSLs together. The others seem much more focused on strictly GAT (at least, for now) - so, seeing how you mix DSLs in seamlessly would be great.

I hope you'll approve my request to join!

re: The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

jezzsa — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 19:03:26 GMT

Thanks Austin.

The GDN workspace is currently private because we are unable to share the actual factory bits publically at present.

Hopefully that may change in the near future.

Would you have a suggestion on what further information I can publically provide and in what form, I'd be happy to help?

Jezz

re: The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

Austin — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 07:04:39 GMT

Just curious - why are you unable to publish the bits? Is it because Microsoft will be releasing it as some sort of supported (or quasi-supported, a la P&P) offering at some future point in time?

What I'm mainly interested in is seeing the marriage of DSL Tools and GAT, to get a feel for how they play together. At the moment, it honestly seems that they are both great tools, but that together they've got the potential to be so much more than the sum of their parts.

However, on the flip side of that coin, I think the complexity of learning two separate large tools is daunting. I'm currently using GAT, and want to look at the DSL Tools in the future, but learning two large tool sets is too much now.

Maybe if you could blog more about challenges faced in using these technologies together? "Lessons learned", if you will. And places where the story between the two tools just isn't quite there yet?

re: The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

jezzsa — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:26:55 GMT

Hi Austin,

The EFx factory is not a p&p offering but rather an offering from Microsoft Consulting Services. Which means officially we sell the Factory offering to customers who engage our services.

I totally feel your pain. As one of the first GAT and DSL integrators I went through untold pain trying to GAT working correctly with DSL components. Not for the faint hearted, especially for newcomers to the technologies.
I would not wish that upon anyone.

However, now we have pretty good experience on how this can work well together, and am happy to share those experiences with you.

This blog is dedicated to the EFX factory itself and its vision rather than a roll of experiences with the technologies and tools. My good friend Edward Bakker (www.edwardbakker.nl) has been documenting his experiences with the DSL toolset and more recently with the GAT integration, and I should point you to his blog for more details of that. I would ask you to poke him to provide more of these details and experiences, since for me to start now and record all my findings would take from now to the end of the earth to capture efficiently for you.

I am thinking of ways to demonstrate this integration to you and that might result in some blogcasts or similar so you can see this working.

Jezz Santos on Software Factories

Tom Hollander's blog — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 05:44:34 GMT

While I'm (hopefully understandably) excited about the progress that our team has made on Software Factories...

re: The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

Real world EA — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 17:33:30 GMT

Thanks for the excellent article.

It is really nice to see how application development is evolving and rapid advances in applications-development automation tools.

Just curious, when I look at EFx offering; other than "schematic" differences between UML and DSL (which I think the benefit of DSL can be achieved by UML profiles) I really have a hard time to find out what exactly are the difference between EFx software factory and OMG MDA?

It seems what you explained here was transformation form PIM to PSM and all the way down to the code with using transformation patterns and templates and that seems to me the implementation of MDA...

I really like to see MDA and SF emerging rather than falling apart. They have more in common than the differences and I do see the benfit of both......and if this emegrence happens it certainly makes architecture practice less challenging especially when it comes toheterogeneous environments...

re: The EFx Architectural Guidance Software Factory

jezzsa — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:14:13 GMT

You have reached the boundary of my knowledge of these acronyms you speak of here. So I got some help for you.
According to a good source, apparently, a well known issue.
See article at: http://www.iasahome.org/iasaweb/resources/attachments?download=true&nodeId=3303&field=attachment

Also see the podcasts referenced by Jack's blog posting: http://blogs.msdn.com/jackgr/archive/2006/01/22/502645.aspx.

Data Mapping Application Block - v.2.0

das Fenster — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:53:21 GMT

&nbsp;I've released a version of the Data Mapping Application Block for EntLib 2.0 on the DMAB gotdotnet...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/software_factory

TrackBack — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:33:07 GMT

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomholl/

TrackBack — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:34:20 GMT

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomholl/archive/2006/07/31/684753.aspx

TrackBack — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 01:35:36 GMT

http://architecturejournal.net/2006/issue9/f5_gsis/page3.aspx

TrackBack — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:47:48 GMT