Re: [modeling-pmc] Sven's comment on Comment to Ed's new main text for t

[Sven Efftinge <sven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Phillip,

your view on the whole topic is so different to mine, that I decided to not go into a more detailed discussion in my first mail.

However I'm glad Ed did so and I agree with everything he said. I fear that there is to little common ground to find a compromise on. 

I've added some comments below, but the bottom line however is: 

I totally respect the work people did at OMG but it is just not relevant for me nor to any of the technologies I've been working on in the past years. 

And it never was. I never shared those visions nor do I know that anybody I work with does.

Sven

On Aug 18, 2012, at 1:53 PM, Philipp W. Kutter | Montages AG <kutter@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Sven wrote:

I have to say that I like the text Ed proposed. But I can imagine (and your analysis certainly makes that clear) that

other members of the EMP have a different view on it. I think the underlying problem is that there are very different views on what 'modeling' actually is.

I agree that today, there are different views within the EMP project, but this is only because we went away from a common vision which was the strength that brought us to where we are now.

No, it is because the visions were always different.

Sven wrote:

*OMG's Modeling*

I see all the standards here backed by the ideas around MDA.

I do no agree to split it. Large parts of the OMG community, and major industry players (UBS, e.t.c.) agreed that the  EMF is a 100% isomorphic variant of EMof, and thus is the basis for everytthing.

Ecore is the basis not EMOF. EMOF was built based on Ecore not the other way around.

Which is actually one of the very rare situations where an OMG standard was deigned along with an actual implementation.

The main idea of the MDA initiative (I cc the main author, so he can correct me) is to use Mof as the center point, and model all other standards, methodologies, especially the domain specific ones with MOF.

I don't care about MDA. In fact most people I'm in contact with don't care.

What they care about is their problem at hand and technologies that can help solving them.

EMF is exactly this, with Mof exchanged with ECore. As the OMG community accepts ECore as the pragmatic implementation of Mof, Eclipse Modeling Project, with its "onion layers" like Ed Merks described in his text is thus an a pragmatic implementation of MDA.

For some people EMF is just a superior alternative to JavaBeans.

Nothing done with ECore can be "non MDA".

Why is that important?

Spliting of "OMG's Modeling" from EMP is a huge step back, it throws us de facto to the wrong thesis that it is simpler to have your own little DSL than following MDA: EMP as a pragmatic implementation of MDA has proven the contrary.

Nobody proposed to split it off. But I certainly want to make very clear that this is not the single and central vision behind the EMP.

Sven wrote:

*Modeling as API design on steroids*

Anything that helps building the perfect abstraction for your problem.

95% of people who know about the real problem in business do not even know what an API is, but they know there business concepts, their properties, dependencies, logic.

And you think these business people come to our website to built DSLs and the like?

We all worked for decades to make modeling work for these 95%.

No, I worked to give software developers powerful tools. 

Business people can't program (or model) unless they think formally, i.e. like a programmer.

As a result, the MDA initiative found, that doing everything with UML2 is the wrong way,

I didn't follow up with the evolution of MDA but last time I checked UML was overly emphasized.

We started from a common vision,

No we didn't.

we where able to pragmatically adapt the dogmatic view we need to do all with EMof/CMof to accept a scaling implementation like ECore as the basis,
and now we give this up.

Believe me. No OMG standard ever played a role in any of the decision I made in the past. 

I don't want to have my work associated with the MDA initiative because it puts people off.

I respect that there is some movement around it, which is why I proposed a dispatching front page.

It's not the central vision behind everything done under the EMP.

We had a commonly agreed message in the old text, and if we are not able to improve it along the lines Miles described, we should simply keep it.

I understood that Miles supports Ed's proposal but suggest to add mentioning the support for industry standards, which

I think is a reasonable approach.

Did we get an absolute majority of project leaders or committers vote for chaning the message? Maybe I am too Swiss, but for changing this we
should have a more democratic process. Fundamental change of the message without agreement of all stakeholders is not fair.

You really think your view is backed by a majority?

If some people want to define a new direction, then this is a new project.

You should better check the initial project proposal. 

It mentions OMG industry standards as just one part of the scope. It nowhere states that EMP is meant to be an implementation of MDA.

Both alternatives destroy the progress we made, and which was the basis for a decision to follow the EMP by many big enterprises.

I also know a lot of enterprises working with technology from EMP. I'm very confident that they welcome our modern, pragmatic and developer-centric 

approach.