24th of September in room 78.622 (General Purpose South) at 2pm

Afternoon tea will be served at 1:45.

Title:

Driven Development and the Eclipse Modelling Framework

Speaker:

Jörn Guy Süß

Abstract:

Object-Orientation is a particularly useful technique for the elaboration of engineering domains, because it combines stereotypical ontological concepts like type (is-a), construction (consists-of) and general relation (has-to-do-with), with cardinality and life-cycle constraints. However, class diagrams usually stay on the whiteboards where they serve as an aid to gain understanding of the engineering domain. When the domain's conceptualisation turns into the code of the engineers modelling tool, the link breaks, and the clarity of concepts is washed away in the sea of code. Once implemented, the concepts cannot be distinctly grasped any more and their maintenance and reuse is substantially more difficult.

Model-Driven Development seeks to overcome this design-code separation by radical mechanisation. By using a chain of generative tools, a complete tool set for an engineering domain including textual and graphical editors can be spun of a high-level model. This makes the development of domain-specific modelling tools and editors much more attainable then it was in the past and increases maintainability and flexibility of the tools' code.

This talk will give a short genealogy of the Model-driven technology and then follow it up with a practical example of its application. It finishes of with a summary of challenges and limitations. Familiarity with Java and XML and a passing knowledge of CORBA are beneficial to, but not essential for, the understanding of this talk.

The Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is built into all modern browsers, so it's already installed on your desktop and that of your clients. Is it worth your while to learn how to use it? In this talk, I'll introduce XSL Transformations and show code examples for several different ways it can be used: for boilerplate presentation templates, for basic macro substitution, or for full-blown functional programming.

Afterwards you should have an idea about where XSLT can be useful, and another good reason to choose XML for your documents.

Format

Each session starts with a short talk (~25 min.) by a developer, which describes current or past work, and gives a personal critique of the usefulness of the software engineering process employed.

An open discussion will follow the talk, during which the attendees will be able to ask questions, make suggestions, or debate the merits of various tools and techniques.

Proceeding each talk, coffee and tea (as well as biscuits) will be available to improve attention, and encourage attendance.

Goals

The central goal of the discussion group is to facilitate sharing of software engineering expertise between developers and provide exposure to new methodologies and techniques. Our aim is to increase the level of software engineering expertise among complex systems modelers.

Talk topics may vary widely: the use of a design notation; the effectiveness of a particular tool; a description of current or past programming work; or a personal critique of the usefulness of a software engineering technique used.

We Need You

We are calling for people interested in presenting to the group to come along to the meeting on Monday or send us a short abstract and likely availability.

We also need interested participants to come along and share in the discussion.

If you have any questions or comments please contact:

Daniel Bradley <daniel@itee.uq.edu.au>

or

Leighton Brough <brough@itee.uq.edu.au>