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

[Martin Taal <mtaal@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
As a modeling@runtime user/developer I can only say that I totally agree with Sven, Miles and Ed. I work in the business web application world, developing ERP systems. I can imagine that OMG standards are important to form a sound base for EMF technologies (don't even know about that..). But as a developer and user of EMF technologies I never had the need to look at OMG standards, for my work area and users of Teneo/Texo technology OMG is just not a topic...

I did a quick search on the EMF newsgroup for OMG, I found 30 posts on a total of 59027 (and half are announcements on conferences). Maybe OMG standards (in relation with eclipse modeling) are discussed on other newsgroups more extensively?

I think it is a great pity that EMF/ecore/modeling@runtime is not much more known in the web development world. So the average java/eclipse developer. For me this is the audience the landing page should attract. And for sure not discourage. Focusing on OMG and other standards is for me a wrong direction...

As Miles noted, people in the modeling/OMG arena will already know what the EMF technologies do and can provide. So I think some generic sentence about standards support with some links is enough. Just to give the average java developer a good feel that this is technology with a strong base, without bothering him/her with any details which can only put him/her off.

Also, I think it makes sense to have some form of categorization (3 as a maximum) as Sven proposes, and ofcoure modeling@runtime should be the first/top category :-) (joking).

With Regards, Martin Taal

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On 08/19/2012 03:19 AM, Miles Parker wrote:

On 2012-08-18, at 3:03 PM, Sven Efftinge <sven@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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. 

It sounds that way to me as well. It does make sense to have a page talking about Eclipse Modeling as a standards driven (driving, really!) platform for MDA -- and people with that motivation can work at driving eyeballs to such a page -- but you get the worst of all worlds when you start designing by committee. Eclipse projects are by design not democratic, but they are certainly participatory. I'm sure that Ed will take into account the feelings of the community, but it's actually more important to me that there is a strong single vision than that it happens to agree with mine, and that's what I'll support. The worst thing is a muddled vision.

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.

+1. In fact, by far the greatest barrier to me in convincing colleagues and organizations to adopt EMP technologies is the word "Model". MDA with most of these folks is the kiss of death. I'm not being hyperbolic. We shouldn't even be getting into the kind of conversations about how model-driven approaches aren't about UML; you've already lost the battle at that point.

We all know the history of that and how it could have been better -- and we don't need to get into a debate about that :) -- but the bottom-line is hubris and obsessive over-generalization. There is something fundamentally broken about trying to develop a single over-arching schema that rules them all -- it actually misses something deep about fundamental CS issues and the way the world works -- the best you can hope for are M3 and M2 representations that allow many schemas to interact consistently and that in my mind is what EMF facilitates.

Phillip has a lot of interesting thoughtful things to say, and we all have different perspectives. There are many domains for which it is very natural to think in OMG and Standards language, but the vast majority of developers only care about whether a) a tool makes it possible to do more things more easily and hopefully more enjoyably, and b) other people can adopt it without having to learn too much new stuff, lock-in to a particular vendor or be left high-and-dry when the next new wave crashes ashore. I've been struck actually by how conservative most Software Engineers are and as I see more and more of the real world issues that they face, I can understand why.

This is the audience that has to be won over. These tools are all powerful and very cool -- regardless of what they do-- and people just need to use them; the greatest barrier to adoption is when people talk about them. The fact that everything that they do in that tool is secretly a "model" (Ed has convinced me that even that is a bad word :) ), well in that case it will just be a happy discovery when a few years later they discover that that is what they really wanted all along.

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.

Exactly, in fact if anything I think Ed's current text has far too many three syllable words. Sorry, Ed. ;D

cheers,

Miles
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