DSLs at JAOO

JAOO  in Aarhus, Denmark, is getting big - almost 900 participants, I heard.

There was a Domain Specific Languages track on Wednesday - DSLs is really gathering steam!  The day kicked off with an excellent plenary on Software Factories and DSLs by Microsoft architects Arvindra Sehmi and Beat Schwegler. Markus Voelter gave a very interesting talk on how to design DSLs, and Juha-Pekka Tolvanen - who has been doing it for a decade - about how to put them to use.

MetaCase (usually represented by Juha-Pekka or Steve Kelly) always emphasise how you can build whole systems from DSLs, without any (or much) extra 'glue' code. I guess this is because in general they're working with mature product lines - often in embedded systems like phones. There, the generic framework is sufficiently evolved with sufficiently well-defined bounds.  In the MS work, we tend to talk more about cases where the DSL is just covering some part of it.