Domain specific Languages
This year JAOO has a whole track on Domain Specific languages, a trend that is still in the embryonic stage in the software industry but promises to catch on rapidly. The work at Intentional Software ( Charles Simonyi's new gig) , JetBrains's Meta Programming System and Microsoft's Software Factories is the first stage of a promising wave.
I attended a session by the Microsoft guys demonstrating their set of working DSL modeling that will ship with Visual Studio 2005. Very impressive stuff and what is cool is tat they have been able to create multiple views ( design, deployment etc) as projections of an abstract model of generic concepts that allows them to keep real time synchronisation between code and graphical views of a model. They also showed off a Language Workbench that is again available to design new DSls and a sample application developed by a company that had created a DSl for a set of workflow based applications for the insurance industry - impressive to see it all working. Wonder when Microsoft will start applying this panacea of software factories to make its own product ship cycles mmore predictable :)
Also attended a session by Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks which was basically a summary of his article at http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html.The session was too short to come away with any blinding insights but the point that stuck in my mind was his belief that DSLs are primarly a means to convey configuration information in different and more user friendly ways. I'm not sure I agree with that as I believe the configuration and code based categorisations of logic are on the way to merging - particularly clear in the areas around BPM and orchestrations which can be seen either as configuration metadata or as a programming language in its own right.
I attended a session by the Microsoft guys demonstrating their set of working DSL modeling that will ship with Visual Studio 2005. Very impressive stuff and what is cool is tat they have been able to create multiple views ( design, deployment etc) as projections of an abstract model of generic concepts that allows them to keep real time synchronisation between code and graphical views of a model. They also showed off a Language Workbench that is again available to design new DSls and a sample application developed by a company that had created a DSl for a set of workflow based applications for the insurance industry - impressive to see it all working. Wonder when Microsoft will start applying this panacea of software factories to make its own product ship cycles mmore predictable :)
Also attended a session by Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks which was basically a summary of his article at http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html.The session was too short to come away with any blinding insights but the point that stuck in my mind was his belief that DSLs are primarly a means to convey configuration information in different and more user friendly ways. I'm not sure I agree with that as I believe the configuration and code based categorisations of logic are on the way to merging - particularly clear in the areas around BPM and orchestrations which can be seen either as configuration metadata or as a programming language in its own right.
posted by Piyush Pant | 1:54 AM
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