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Category Archives: opinion
I envy the strong industrial involvement in the web research community
According to a tweet by Matthias Heinrich , the WWW’2012 conference (in short, the most important research conference on web topics) had a very strong presence of industrial players: “Out of 108 papers, Yahoo contributed to 22 and MS to 13 papers.” and more than 40 people from Google attended . Compared to these numbers,
MDE wins, eventually
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Some months ago Bruno Oliveira posted a very popular chart in Google+ comparing the way geeks and non-geeks approached the execution of repetitive tasks. Obviously, I agree with his view but I also believe that the same kind of
A better understanding of Drupal module interactions thanks to UML
You already know that I dropped Drupal to move to WordPress but this doesn’t mean I’m very happy to report on people talking about the benefits (or disadvantatges) of using UML and MDE/modeling in general in their professional life. In this case, Lin Clark explains how she thinks UML sequence diagrams are helping her work
Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(III): Test your market exists
(cross-posted from the “Stories of a (failed) entrepreneur” blog) This is the third in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up shutting down due to the lack of clients. In previous posts, I recommended to Choose a cool
Very high customer acquisition cost for MDD tools
MDD tool vendors differ in many aspects but they have one thing in common. They all (well, all those I’ve interviewed or I’ve discussed with, which I do believe are a representative sample) agree that the cost of customer acquisition is really high. Roughly speaking, you must first attract their attention (e.g. sponsoring this site
Creating DSLs, a word of caution
As all (relatively) new techniques, we are still in the process of learning when and how creating a DSLs is the best solution for a given software development scenario. Otherwise, we may end up following again the technology hype cycle (as already happened with UML; we are still paying the consequences) and fall trap of
Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(II): Don’t sell to developers
(cross-posted from the “Stories of a (failed) entrepreneur” blog) This is the second in a series of posts trying to explain what I think went wrong with my attempt of selling online code-generation services, that I end up giving up for free due to the lack of clients. In the previous post, I recommended to
Why did I fail with the online code-generation services – Advise(I): Choose a cool technology to sell
(cross-posted from the “Stories of a (failed) entrepreneur” blog) This is the first of a short series of posts where I try to reflect on the reasons that forced me to stop trying to make money out of the (now free of use) online code-generation services . I hope you find my experience useful! (and
The only thing I miss from the ER language
The Entity-relationship was (well, still is in the database domain) a popular modeling language to define the (static) conceptual schema of your system. UML class diagrams (with a little bit of help from OCL) can be regarded as a superset of the ER language, which explains why ER is slowly disappearing (e.g. some years ago,
MDE equation: models + transformations = software
I think it’s time to revisit Niklaus Wirth famous equation: Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs from a MDE (didactic) perspective. I propose the following MDE equation: Models + Transformations = Software Of course, it’s a simplification of the reality (well, in the same way Wirth’s one was, in both cases we omit, for instance,
