ProgGen – Code Generation
I’ve long been a supporter of the work that APG is doing in the Gen space, specifically with promoting the use of Model Based Development. It’s good to see that they are exploiting the true strength of a Model-Based-Development environment – i.e. models for other purposes than originally designed – thus extending the range of possiblities and therefore getting more return of investment from those models.
They will be promoting their technology at CodeGeneration 2010 in Cambridge, UK.
I’d urge anyone with either an academic or professional interest in Model Based Development as a whole to attend this conference and hear what they have to say.
To connect with like-minded people to discuss Model Based Software Development, a great place is the SOMOMOSOEN group. There are some very informative papers which can be downloaded there.
[...] had permission from DannySaro, the author of this comment to turn it into a proper post – he has many valid points – the discussion that will invariably [...]
I also love the work done by APG team. As you mention, they have a strong solution based on some of the most recent insights in model driven architecture. I will not pretend to understand the complete depth and breadth of their solution and all of the exciting things they will be able to do with it. But I wanted to make a comment on another aspect of model-based development which is maybe currently not that well served anymore (looking at it optimistically I should say ‘not that well served yet!’)
Let my base my comment on the current use of CA Gen. Well…, the business-oriented part of the CA Gen model is hardly used anymore, all the stuff listed under the planning and analysis submenus of the Toolset. There are various reasons for this, but probably the biggest reason is the fact that working with this business information was/is very much geared towards the IEF methodology and as we all know methodologies have moved along since the early nineties. That formal part of gathering business information, business requirements via analysis has much, much less focus in today’s agile methods. I think it is obvious that if you don’t spend time identifying and describing that information then how is it ever going to be entered into the model. The sad thing is that this information does have its use inside the model, it describes the business rules in an abstract technology neutral, even computational neutral, way. And those business rules then govern the downstream effects of what functionality is actually generated. That information also documents the business-IT alignment that everybody is searching after, again, this does have its value when one has governance and compliance in mind.
So where does that information gets stored then nowadays if not inside the model? A lot of it is to be found in unstructured text and documents, user scenario’s, use cases, … And yes, it’s unstructured and therefore not very well suited to fit into a formal metamodel.
I think a possible solution lies in all the technologies that arise around ontologies. An ontology in general is defined as (thank you Wikipedia): ” the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.”…” In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain.”
That’s modeling, right? The technologies I mention are things like Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema (RDFS), Ontology Web Language (OWL) … These technologies allow to capture the information inside an unstructured text into a model. A model that is actually governed by its own metamodel. RDF and OWL models are very versatile. If you want you can have the definition of the metamodel defined in the same place as the actual model information. The metamodel can also be extended on the fly if some new concepts need to be documented. Models and metamodels can be merged without effort, and because the technologies are based on firm mathematical concepts like set theory, it is even possible to let inference engines run over these models and based on the information in the model and the (business) rules defined in the metamodel they can deduct new non-existing information.
The saying goes: every formal metamodel can be expressed as an ontology, but not every ontology can be expresssed as a formal metamodel. So, as a Gen model can be expressed as an ontology, I am interested to find out how a Gen model could be populated by information contained in what would be regarded as fairly unstructured text, i.e. the user scenarios, the use cases, … mentioned above. If we could make that happen then we have again connected the business model, the business requirements with the rest of the application life cycle. We could then truly speak again of a “complete application life cycle”.
There you have it, I wanted to make a small comment, and see what happened…
If there are people out there that would also be interested in exploring how these technologies could contribute to the overal value proposition of CA Gen’s model-based development then please come forward!