Code Generation 2007

I had the pleasure of attending the Code Generation 2007 conference held at Homerton College, Cambridge on the weekend of 19 and 20 May (actually, it started on the Friday but I was unable to attend until the Saturday). I went because it was some years since I looked at code generation and I wanted to see how the state of the art had changed. The presenters were very competent, academically sound but grounded in real life and the conference was friendly and well run (thanks to Software Acumen).

I don't think that I'm going to be able to apply much in the way of code generation to my day job but it was a very well run conference and certainly thought provoking. I picked up a couple of books and I have dug out a couple more from my shelves.

I didn't find much new in the generic modelling and code generation techniques although it was good to have my views checked by comparison with current best practices and I will take a long look at how to preserve design intent at some time. Krzysztof Czarnecki of the Univ of Waterloo in Canada was notable in this area. The area that were new to me was the coverage of Domain Specific Models (DSM) and Domain Specific Languages (DSL).

Two good sessions on DSMs were run by Juha Pekka Tolvanen of MetaCase and I was particularly struck by the Symbian OS S60 application generator. Juha Pekka was very good at identifying the success factors for a DSM to avoid misplaced use.