MoDELS 2014 Conference, in Valencia-Spain, was a very interesting opportunity to meet with researchers from academia and from the industry, and by the way discover the latest model-driven approaches and tools. “Modeling” technologies and the “Cloud” were quite recurrent terms. The buzz word was used in posters, demonstrations, and some talks as well. A satellite event called CloudMDE was organized in parallel, the proceedings are available here. Cool, so this is good news! The Cloud is gaining more attention in the Modeling community, and that’s normal; a lot of areas of computer science are seeking the Cloud, and Modeling is a part of it. The event was also an opportinuty to demonstrate DSLFORGE in front of a big audience (more than 400 conference attendees)… that was a great moment!
There is a plenty of reasons why people seek the browser approach. One interesting discussion was on how to use DSLFORGE as a front-end for demonstration purposes. Indeed, many people work remotely with customers, and they don’t necessarily want to impose to decision makers a full fledged IDE to see their latest achievements.
My focus this time was more on tools naturally, looking for some advanced techniques to do modeling online. At a first glance, modeling online seems today possible, there were some interesting demos indeed such as Umple and Txture. The former allows to update textual representations from UML diagrams, the latter allows to update textual representations using forms. None of the demonstrated tools allows to edit directly textual editors. There is a lack of technology support to get the working online wokbench you dreamt of, still a lot of challenges to come across before being able to see such next generation tools. I’m more convinced now that what we’ve done in DSLFORGE is a big step ahead.
I’ve been asked whether the tool is available for download… well the code is not open-sourced yet, however there is a mailing list if you want to get notified about the latest news. Please fill in your contact information below, you can unsubscribe at any time simply by sending an email to team@dslforge.org
