LOCATION: Zürich
KEYWORDS: Concept, Methods, Tools, Product

Why do we believe in modelling technologies?

Once upon a time, Bran Selic, IBM Distinguished Engineer, said something like this:
"When I came to this country I was developing circuits for heat compensation. There is nothing more uninteresting than that, except perhaps coding a brand new string library".

Models are based on abstraction, the most powerful concept for combating complexity. Modelling tools bring giga horse power of platform, middleware, persistency, performance, availability, scalability, safety, security and all that under the hood. They enable you to refine and master the things you have to juggle in your everyday business.

Our 3 guests do just that: they provide tools you can use to build your highly innovative and complex applications: quickly, safely and rust-free!

Yours sincerely,
the Model Interest Group of JUGS

Model Driven Development, Grundprinzipien um das Potential zu nutzen

SPEAKER: Johannes Scheier   COMPANY: Scheier Software Engineering
SLIDES: 061018_johannes_scheier.pdf

Model Driven Develpment (MDD) verspricht eine Vielzahl von Vorteilen, wie z.B. geringerer Entwicklungsaufand, bessere Anpassbarkeit an neue Bedürfnisse und bessere Dokumentation.
Diese Vorteile kommen kommen jedoch nicht alleine durch Codegenerierung aus Modellen. Sie lassen sich nur voll ausschöpfen, wenn gewisse Grundprinizpien, beachtet werden.

Das Referat gibt zuerst eine kurze Einführung zu MDD und den davon erwarteten Vorteilen gegenüber herkömmlicher Software-Entwicklung.
Im Hauptteil werden die Grundprinzipien von MDD vorgestellt, ausführlich erklärt und mit Beispielen illustriert.
Zum Schluss wird ein Tool vorgestellt, das auf diesen Grundprinizpien aufbaut.

Model Driven Architecture: Efficiently react to changing architectural and functional requirements

SPEAKER: Wim Bast   COMPANY: Compuware AG
SLIDES: 061018_wim_bast.ppt

MDA is an answer to the need for effective and efficient application development in the midst of changing technologies and changing functional requirements.

Much application architecture exists for Java: Spring, Hibernate, JSP, struts, EJB 2.0, SOA, POJO's, data-access components and so on. More technologies will emerge but none of them will be the silver bullet. Investments in IT are mostly based on the usage of a specific technology. There is a risk, however, that your realized application is already old-fashioned before it is even in production. We need to invest in artifacts that will hold their value in the long run.

At the same time, we need to leverage our knowledge of Java technology more efficiently.
Even if we know how to develop applications in a chosen technology, it is still a time consuming and error-sensitive process to build all parts of an application. Furthermore, it is only at the end of development that we have gained the knowledge of how to develop the application even better.
Wouldn't it be nice to automate the process - to improve existing application development according to our new technology know-how?

MDA tools, like OptimalJ, help you quickly develop Java applications in the application architecture of choice. What's more, MDA gives you full control to efficiently realize:

• Architectural improvements in existing applications;
• Functionality changes without re-thinking all technical considerations.

Domain-Specific Modeling for Full Code Generation

SPEAKER: Juha-Pekka Tolvanen   COMPANY: MetaCase

Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) languages provide a viable solution for improving development productivity by raising the level of abstraction beyond coding. With DSM, the models are made up of elements representing concepts that are part of the domain world, not the code world (like e.g. in UML). These languages follow domain abstractions and semantics, allowing developers to perceive themselves as working directly with domain concepts. In many cases, full final product code can be automatically generated from these high-level specifications with domain-specific code generators.
This talk introduces domain-specific modeling languages and shows real-life examples from various fields of software product development - ranging from embedded cell phone software to B2B J2EE web sites. Second part of the talk addresses the guidelines for implementing DSM: how to identify the necessary language constructs, and different ways of building code generation.