Customer Reviews

Domain-Specific Modeling: Enabling Full Code Generation

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This book is excellent. It deals with why we need domain specific modeling (DSM), starting off with business value- then defines DSM and provides an architecture for it - the language, the models, code generation, a framework and the process that connects all of these. It follows this with 5 detailed case studies and then towards the end talks about uses and tools.

I enjoyed reading it and am planning to implement in my projects. The authors are associated with a tool that does DSM - Metaedit+ found at metacase dot com and which has a trial download.

The authors seemed very knowledgeable on the subject.
However I must confess to being a little disappointed by the first half of this book and not reading the second half.
The authors seems to feel the need to demolish UML which left a somewhat unpleasant taste in the mouth.
The domain specific modeling examples in part III of the book seemed to be focused on a variety of platforms and the modeling of the applications were in terms of those platforms. e.g. You should model Mobile phone applications with Form, Query and SendSMS diagram icons. I felt a much more appropriate title of the book would have been Platform-Specific Modeling.
My personal interest is in understanding the problem-domain to solution-domain mapping. This book seems to be simply about capturing solution domain assets diagrammatically and generating code from the diagrams.

Domain-specific modeling (DSM) is an approach articulated around three elements: a specific modeling language, code generation and a domain framework. The book authors work for a company that has been proposing a DSM tool since the last century. This make them first-hand experts on the topic, but you have also to remind which side they are when they talk about DSM compared to other approaches. The authors are conscious of this and discuss it openly, so that the reader can be aware of the situation. This being said, this book is an excellent and convincing presentation of what is domain-specific modeling, what it is not and how it relates to generic modeling approaches like UML. It contains more than 100 pages of real case studies showing how you can use DSM in different contexts (embedded software, insurance, etc). Finally, a final part guides you in details through the different steps needed to create a DSM solution. This part contains an important decision guide that will allow you to evaluate if your domain is suited for a DSM effort.

The book is very well written and is certainly a must read for every software developer who could be involved in the development of software that has some "product" attributes, that is software projects that involve repeated development efforts based on a common domain knowledge. It will also allow you to think and understand more deeply what is modeling and how you can reuse the initial investments in understanding the domain and creating the first products.