Another cool meeting !

After Java Productivity tour 3 weeks ago, I could participate to the first edition of "Jeudis des modèles". Theses meeting take place in EMN Nantes every two months and deal with the Model Driven Engineering.

So, thuesday there was two presenters for this first time :

• Nicolas Rouquette from the JPL, NASA
• And Patrick Albert from ILog (IBM)

The first talk (from Nicolas) introduced the use of models in the JPL and especially why NASA came to use the models in its software design process. Nicolas, who defines the Software design methodology, explained the evolution in the way of create software that drive the lander sent on mars. Of course, this kind of software must be very robust and it design became more and more harder this last years.
So JPL had to improve again and again its design process and with the growing complexity of this process, they came to using models since 10 years now.

The talk of Patrick describes the evolution of software design in ILog. During the ILog evolution, they realized that there was an important part of programming that didn't implies algorithmic but only business rules. Theses rules could be defined by end-users if the way to express it was enough easy.
In this approach, they decided to create a language easy to understand that allow to defines theses rules. With the years, they naturally came to use the DSL part of the MDE.

Finally, these two very interested talks described two different ways to come to using models. It was very instructive to see other uses of the MDA that the one we apply every day and I hope can participate to the next edition.

I wanted to add some pictures I took during the conference but the camera of my cell made very ugly shots and I definitively can't show you them. Perhaps it's time to ask for a cell with 10Mpxl camera ... :)