Ted Johnson on Programming & Architecture

I like most people, I suspect, especially software architects and programmers, dream of white boards on every wall floor to ceiling. I have wanted this for some time for my office so I could doodle hours away in my office getting dizzy on the dry erase fumes. In the past I had looked for a quality product and failed, until now. Visiting my undergraduate college ( St. Olaf ) the computer science for it's brand new shared building has for entire rooms painted a white board surface onto the walls. STUNNING! Want to convey an idea, design a group project, doodle, noodle, or whatever, just walk up to a wall. I hope it holds up and I hope to get around to painting my office soon. I think they are using one of the more expensive products, IdeaBoard , but I am emailing the school to double check. Finally a canvas large enough to hold all of the crazy UML diagrams and brainstorms.

Martin Fowler and Markus Völter on DSLs - JAOO Conference Somewhat interesting discussion by some DSL leaders. There is a small bias around a specific vendor's software, but interesting to listen too. What they talked about, my notes: DSLs: - Internal - External - IDE/Language Workbench - MDA is vaporware Eclipse GMF/EMF/Textual Languages CASE Tools, COBOL, Fantasy that programmers are not needed. Levels of DSL/DSM tooling - Documentation/Testing/Execution Custom Syntax (External DSL) vs Internal Syntax (Internal DSL , Lisp/Ruby) Method Chaining, Cool! 1 notation or many notations (Excel, Boxes and Lines, etc) Power in how to combine the notations. Divergence, Experimentation, and then Convergence. UML is not a factor, so they think. Here is the book in progress that Martin Fowler references, it was in draft form at time of my writing this post. Fowler's DSL book draft