As we near the end of the entry period for our first annual developer contest, please be sure to send us your entries by 9/30!  First prize is $25,000 and total prize awards will exceed $40,000.  For more information, visit www.skywaycup.org.

Good luck and speak with you soon.  DC

We are pleased to announce the formation of our Board of Advisors and the addition of Ed Merks, a widely-recognized software application delivery expert and significant member of the Eclipse Foundation, and Erich Winkler, a former IT Executive whose career spanned numerous international assignments with Altria and Philip Morris.

The Skyway Software Board of Advisors consists of business and technology leaders with expertise in financial services, retail, consumer products, and information technology, with particular expertise in commercial and open-source software development technologies.  Read the press release here.

To say that its a significant milestone in our corporate success would be an understatement!  We are poised and ready to go for 2009 and beyond!  

Speak with you soon.  DC

Skyway Software, the expert in simplifying software delivery, is listed as a key Composite Application vendor in Application Architecture, 2008, as published by Gartner in their annual Hype Cycle report. This Hype Cycle report covers a broad collection of Web 2.0, cloud computing, and service-oriented architecture technologies and methodologies and provides Gartner’s predictions for the most important technologies during the next 12 months based on several key technology characteristics, including maturity, adoption, and impact.      

According to Gartner, composite application techniques and methodologies will see mainstream adoption soon (many already are here, including Skyway Builder) and their business impact will be high.

“Our listing in Gartner’s Composite Applications category highlights our expertise in model-centric delivery of Rich Internet Application and Web Services,” says Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, “and our customers, including TDAmeritrade and Landesbank Baden-Wurttemburg, currently use Skyway Builder to develop, test, and deploy new applications – and to extend existing applications – more quickly and more accurately than ever before.”         

Once again, we are very pleased with Gartner’s ongoing recognition of Skyway Software.

Do you follow the trends?  While Java still holds a commanding lead in the general-purpose language, its important to note that specific-purpose languages (such as Ruby [read: domain-specific language) continue to grow in importance and relevancy, as shown below.

Why?  Because flexibility and customization still matter – a lot.  Read our take on the importance of DSLs for delivering RIAs and Web Services here and here and here!  And let us know what you think.

Speak with you soon.  DC

At your request, we are providing additional thought leadership directly from our Technical Teammates!  Read our tech blog here and gain hints on how to optimize your Skyway Builder experience, get tips on new tools, analyze our perspective on tech trends, and discover how our technologists tie it all together for their own use.

Enjoy and speak with you soon.  DC

Skyway Software, the expert in simplifying software delivery, is listed as a key Composite Application vendor in Web and User Interface Technologies, 2008, as published by Gartner in their annual Hype Cycle report. This Hype Cycle report covers a broad collection of Web-oriented technologies and methodologies and provides Gartner’s predictions for the most important technologies during the next 12 months based on several key technology characteristics, including maturity, adoption, and impact.

According to Gartner, composite application techniques and methodologies will see mainstream adoption soon (many already are here, including Skyway Builder) and their business impact will be high.

“Our listing in Gartner’s Composite Applications category highlights our expertise in model-centric delivery of Rich Internet Application and Web Services,” says Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, “and our customers, including The Hershey Company and the Federal Aviation Administration, currently use Skyway Builder to develop, test, and deploy new applications – and to extend existing applications – more quickly and more accurately than ever before.”

We are very pleased by Gartner’s ongoing recognition of Skyway Software.

Speak with you soon.  DC

A bit dated (May 2008), but still relevant.  Hosted by Sys-Con.tv, it’s a discussion of Skyway Software, our products, customers, and the Skyway Cup.

Enjoy!  Speak with you soon.  DC

Last Week I was in Antwerp for the SpringOne08 conference where Skyway was honored to be one of the event sponsors and presenters.  It was great to meet with everyone who took time to stop by the booth, and to have an opportunity to attend several of the great talks put on by SpringSouce and their partners.   

(Dave and I at the Skyway Booth)

The opening day keynote was very interesting highlighting the new technologies and offerings from Spring most notably the Spring Tool Suite and the Spring Application Platform. Skyway has invested in delivering our technologies as a set of plugins that can be installed within the Spring Tool Suite to make it easier to build and configure Spring based applications deployable to the Spring Application Platform. One of our goals has been to incorporate the latest Spring technologies and best practices into our code generation facilities so it was great to see the Spring 2.5 features being presented, with an emphasis on some of the great new capabilities around annotation which we use extensively.

Skyway had a daily drawing to win an IPod Touch. We were happy to get to spend some time with one of the winners (Sam) who was kind enough to update us on our best beer options — thanks Sam, from your friendly neighborhood Skyway guys.

Christian Dupuis gave a great talk demonstrating the capabilities of the Spring Tool suite on Day 1 both in the Keynote, and during a break out session. There was also a very interesting partner talk from Oracle regarding Eclipse Link given by Shaun Smith and Rob Harrop that covered some of the great capabilities in Eclipse Link (a.k.a. Toplink) and its ability to allow JPA based persistence to be optimized.

I was also happy to see the announcement of Peter Cooper-Ellis joining the Spring team and to hear him say a few words during the keynote on Day 1. Peter has long been responsible for the Weblogic Server product for BEA and his joining Spring as they enter the Application Server / Platform market should have large impact on Springs success in this area. Skyway presented a talk on Model Driven Development for the Spring platform on Day 2 where we demonstrated Skyway Version 6 by running through the Skyway Web Banking reference application running on the Spring Application Platform. We showed an integrated Skyway and Spring Tool Suite IDE being used to model out the solution while highlighting the natural switching between model and code views. Hopefully those that attended the presentation or who stopped by our booth were able to gain an understanding of how to use our tooling and we would love to see everyone at our community site http://www.skywayperspectives.org
All of these presentations will be available (hopefully soon) at Parlays.com which was founded by Stephan Janssen  who is responsible for coordinating this show as well as JavaPolis which has been renamed to Javoxx www.javoxx.com

Valerie Hillewaere did a great job of making sure that we had everything we needed along the way which we greatly appreciated. Belgium was beautiful and we hope to be back soon!

IT folks are always looking for ways to simplify and accelerate the delivery process.  There are often niche ideas that linger around for years until technology finally advances to the point of making such niche ideas feasible to the masses.  Sometimes it is not even a technology advancement that is needed, but simply a mindset change.  Regardless of which of these holds true, Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) are finally starting to enter mainstream consciousness as a compelling mechanism for delivering software.

For those new to the concept, a DSL is a simply way to build solutions that fall into a specialized domain area.  When I say build, I mean just that – the code for the solution is created automatically from the DSL description.  The basic idea of DSL sprung up from the complexity around delivering solutions using a general-purpose language such as Java – or even describing a solution in a general purpose medium like UML.

Shattering the UML Mythology

The biggest difference between UML and DSL is that DSL focus on the description of the solution translating directly into the implementation of the solution.  UML makes no such attempt.  Personally, I hate UML – mainly because I hate complexity and repetitive work.  UML is heavy weight and requires a good bit of training.  If all the work of describing something in UML could automatically turn into running code, then maybe the investment would be worth it.  As it stands, UML only serves to describe a system, not to produce the actual implementation of a system.  Sure, you can use UML to describe how you will implement the system, but then you still have to run off and code it.  Some UML tools make an attempt at generating code, but due to the massive breadth of UML , no tool can generate all that is described (thus the formation of DSL which I will elaborate on later).  It always makes me chuckle when someone makes a comment that because some development tool is using UML that what it is describing can automatically move to another UML tool and build running code.  When I read or hear such drivel, I immediately dump that person into the “knucklehead” category.  Did you know that since Microsoft is now using UML in their Oslo initiative that whatever you build there can be moved into Rational and run as an application on Java?  Yeah, right.  You might get a good skeleton, from which to code the full solution, but you are sure not going to get a running application.  That would be panacea, but I have yet to see anything even remotely close to this working anywhere.  The closest I have seen is BPEL crossing tools.  But in the BPEL case the actual web services themselves maintain their existing implementation and only the shell stringing them together changes.

The vast majority of shops using UML simply use it as a mechanism for documenting the system that is to be built or has been built.  Even this use of UML often seems like a fool’s errand, since the many of the artifacts described in UML (use cases & sequence diagrams) are not kept in sync with the code that is written to implement the description.  Developers constantly have to go back and update the UML sequence diagrams or use cases once they – inevitably – find that the description provided in UML cannot be implemented as described.  This all seems like a colossal waste of time.  Obviously, I am not the only one who thinks this as just about every developer I have ever talked to seriously dislikes using UML and keeping it in sync with code.  As it stands, UML is often just a glorified mechanism for describing a system.  While I can appreciate the need for a consistent way of describing a system, the complexity and redundancy required for most UML tools is not worth the cost.  The biggest thing that most UML tools can keep in sync with code is the data model and some very basic sequencing.  Oh, joy.  Yet again, this is not worth the cost.  For any UML aficionados reading this, I would ask you how many projects have you done where you have not had to go back and make significant adjustments to the UML documentation post implementation and how much of the actual implementation was generated from the UML documentation? 

Jack of All Trades, Master of None

The most common DSL out there are actually subsets of UML that focus on a specific domain and create actual code implementations.  Ed Merks, who leads the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), had a great line during one of the Modeling Birds of a Feather talks at EclipseCon 2008, “it is not my fault that you have no reference implementation.”  This quote was directed at the UML contingent representing OMG who were looking to have EMF be able to model some functionality that is not even possible to deliver in Java.  I agree with Ed’s assessment that this lack of reference implementation is responsible for the current position of UML as documentation.  For instance, EMF is well coupled with UML, but fixates on having a Java implementation.  This approach of taking subsets of UML and using it to specify a DSL that has a specific implementation (or reference implementation) is great.  It means that you cannot leverage the entirety of UML, but who cares.  Per Ed’s comment, if I know that I am implementing a system in Java, then I really do not care that I cannot use the multiple inheritance aspects of UML since Java does not support multiple super classes anyhow.  That is the problem with UML, it tries to be all things to all people – which is why it ends up being a documentation engine more than anything else.

Technology or Business

 DSL are not perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better than UML.  As the concept of DSL has begun to enter the mainstream, the exercise of nailing down exactly what constitutes a “domain” is just now beginning to be hammered out.  Domain is a pretty overloaded term in the IT world, and in searching the web for definitions of DSL, you are not going to find a ton of specificity.  The bulk of DSL seem to fall into one of two possible categories: technology domains and business domains.  Most DSL descriptions focus on business domains.  For instance, there are lots of examples online of using Ruby to generate a DSL for some specific industry such as healthcare.  In such descriptions of a DSL, there is a data model specific to the healthcare domain along with some functional operations.  In healthcare specifically, there is HL7 – which defines some domain specific data models and Microsoft has gone as far as to specify a WSDL.

The term DSL is also often used to refer to a technology domain rather than a business domain.  For instance, Structured Query Language (SQL) is a technology focused DSL rather than a business DSL.  In fact, SQL is often used as an enabler to many business specific DSL.  This is a pretty common trend.  The software we make here at Skyway is a DSL for web applications and web services.  Yet we have customers who have implemented business specific DSL on top of Skyway. 

This different set of uses for the term DSL needs some specificity in order to be clear to anyone who is not already pretty familiar with the DSL concept.  For the time being, it serves us here at Skyway to simple refer to a business focused DSL or a technology focused DSL.

Wrapping it Up

DSL are often subsets of UML or general purpose languages that focus in on a specific business or technical domain and the real implementation of solutions in that domain.  Where DSL can simplify and accelerate solution delivery, UML is mostly going to serve as a mechanism for documenting solutions.  UML and DSL are not mutually exclusive, you could very well document the system in UML using use cases and sequence diagrams and then proceed to build the solution in a DSL such as Skyway or a business DSL created in Ruby or some other technology.

Thank you for making our presence at SpringOne 2008 a success!  Considered the premiere European conference on Spring technologies and SpringSource products, SpringOne was held June 11-12 in Antwerp, Belgium.  SpringOne participants lined up at the Skyway Booth to engage with our Technical Team and learn how Skyway Builder is the only end-to-end modeling tool (Eclipse plugin) for building, testing, and delivering Rich Internet Applications and Web Services for the Spring Framework and Spring MVC.  Booth visitors also had the opportunity to register to win an iTouch and hear about their chance at winning $25,000 in the Skyway Cup. 

In addition to our Skyway Software booth, Jack Kennedy, Co-founder and VP of Product Delivery at Skyway, delivered a presentation at the conference: “Model Centric Design and Development of RIAs for Spring”.  Jack’s talk provided a brief overview of Skyway Visual Perspectives, which were demonstrated as plugins inside the Spring Tools Suite environment. The discussion included a demonstration of a Skyway built web banking application deployed on the SpringSource Application platform, and how that rich AJAX application was built from the data layer to the web UI with Skyway Visual Perspectives without the need to drop into the code.  Jack also discussed how to easily blend coding and modeling, if desired, whether on new projects or existing projects, and described what the generated code and Spring configuration files looked like and how to extend those files.  Look for a video of Jack’s talk to be posted on our Community website soon!