ARCast on model-driven development

An interesting initial round on this model-driven development podcast, including comments from Jack Greenfield from our team.  Will be fun to watch this one develop...  As someone who was involved in what we believed to be one the big successes of the 80's and 90's so called CASE era, I always find it a little irritating to hear about all the failures, so it was interesting to hear some positive comments about the lessons to learn from that period.  From my experience, what we were doing at Texas Instruments was successful for a long time, in large part because the problem domain we tackled was limited and the patterns well recognized-- we were targeting large scale integrated database transaction processing systems. In effect, while we never described it in these terms, what we developed was a domain specific language - or at least a family of languages.  And as one of the contributors mentioned, the approach relied on the assumption that you never modified a line of generated code - there were lots of user exits but you never touched the code.  We even implemented a feature that deleted the source code after it had been compiled to save space :-)  The approach we used then would be much harder to make successful now, when frameworks are so much richer and the problem domains and application model so much more varied.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 15, 2005
  Hi Bill,
  
  I appreciate your irritation regarding the repeated references to the "failure" of CASE tools in the 80's and 90's. Sure there were pockets of success during that period. As you pointed out, your successes lied in a very limited domain. Also, the technology growing out of those early efforts continues to evolve and shows great promise. So, in that sense the early efforts could be considered a stepping stone to success. However, a great deal of time and resources went into building and implementing CASE tools for business application development. Unfortunately these efforts did not enjoy widespread adoption - indeed most never got past the pilot project stage. As a result, from a business perspective it's hard to consider CASE tools a success.
  
  Martin Danner
  Arrowrock Corporation
  Boise, Idaho
• Anonymous
  May 29, 2009
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