“Model Driven Development and Very High Level Specification Languages"

Presented by Bruce Daniels, Program Manager, Sun Grid Engineering, Sun Microsystems

Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2006
Time: 6:30pm - refreshments, 7:00pm - talk
Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room.
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

Topic:
We are perhaps at the dawning of a new paradigm for application development. In this paradigm, one is allowed and even encouraged to produce a very high level model or specification of an application. As such, this specification tends to capture the intent of the desired system rather than its detailed implementation as currently required. By separating the definition of the core application logic and business process from the architecture and platform middleware technologies used, this new approach offers the promise of much easier, faster, and simpler development.

This paradigm has gone by a number of names such as Model Driven Architecture or MDA (OMG) and Software Factories (Microsoft). In this talk, I will present work at Sun Microsystems on the Distributed Application Specification Language or DASL as a well developed example of this new model driven development paradigm.

About the Speaker:
Bruce Daniels went to school at MIT where he received a B.S. and M.S. and did some work towards a Ph.D. After a couple of years at HP working on programming tools, he moved to Apple. At Apple he was the software manager for the Lisa computer system (conceptual precursor to the Mac) and then served as an early architect for the initial Mac computer. He was a founder and the president of a start-up that produced one of the first relational databases for the Mac called Interlace, later renamed by Borland to be Reflex for the Mac. He was at Oracle for four years where he served as the principal architect for the tools division.

He joined Sun Microsystems initially serving as the software manager for their first SparcStation. For the last ten years he has been working in SunLabs, SunIT, Tools, Professional Services, and now the Sun Grid to try to revolutionize enterprise application development.