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Blog overview 2010

It's the last week of the year again. I always find it a strange feeling, these last weeks of the year... It's like everything is slowing down. A lot of people are taking some days off and the whole atmosphere breaths the signals of an approaching finish.

The nice thing is that it's also a time of reflection. This time of the year invites me to think back a whole year, to reflect on it, and to learn from it. One of the things that's keeping me busy is the way I process information. On a daily base I process so much information that my habit has moved from thorough reading and reflecting on articles to skimming and tagging for possible future use. However, the information stream never stops, so looking back at tagged items and reading them thoroughly almost never happens. Which is a pitty, but the reality is that there just isn't enough time.

Luckily, I still take the time to do in-depth sessions in certain subjects. The only way to force myself to switch from skimming to thorough reading and reflecting is to do something with a subject. That's one of the main reasons I write, and why I like writing. It's a way to crunch a certain subject, to reflect on it, to associate it to my own ideas and to formulate my thoughts in a proper way.

I hope you liked my resulting blog articles this year. I will list an overview of all articles below, as well as the top 10 articles of the year, to help you reflecting on the year. Maybe this time of the year helps you to have the time to read an article in-depth (again), to reflect on it, and to formulate your own thoughts about it. In addition, let me know your thoughts about the article overview and tell me how you would like to continue my journey in 2011. Why did or didn't you like my articles in 2010? Should I write more often? Should I post shorter articles? More or other subjects? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Top 10 posts

Based on traffic, these are the top 10 posts in 2010:

1. DSL development: 7 recommendations for Domain Specific Language design based on Domain-Driven Design
2. 15 reasons why you should start using Model Driven Development
3. 5 types of Model Driven Software Development
4. MDE - Model Driven Engineering - reference guide
5. Best Practices for DSLs and Model Driven Development
6. Why Model Driven Software Development isn't fast enough and how to fix it
7. The Process Centric vs. Information Centric approach to SOA
8. Model Driven Development: Code Generation or Model Interpretation?
   (article with the most comments in 2010)
9. The Future of Software Development
10. A Framework for Model-Driven SOA

I didn’t take the time of publishing into account when looking at the statistics. So, articles posted more recently are less likely to show up in the top 10, unless they are very popular. This explains why the top 4 consists of articles posted in 2009.

Top 10 search terms

These are the top 10 search terms people have use when visiting my blog via a search engine:

1. model driven engineering
2. enterprise architect
3. soa framework
4. model driven software development
5. architecture vs engineering
6. service identification
7. johan den haan
8. domain specific language
9. model driven soa
10. model-driven engineering

Blog summary for 2010

January

• The Process Centric vs. Information Centric approach to SOA: I analyzed different ways to implement a business process in software. You could say it is a BPM vs. EDA (Event Driven Architecture) comparison.
• What Model Driven Development can learn from Content Management Systems: why are content management systems so successful and widespread? What should MDD learn from them to achieve the same?

February

• Why Model Driven Software Development isn't fast enough and how to fix it: if Model-Driven Development becomes succesful, deployment becomes the bottleneck. Cloud platforms or models at runtime are possible solutions.
• Model Driven Engineering vs. The Commando Pattern: double release cycles introduced by MDD can be an advantage. It protects your software against the commando pattern.

March

• Best Practices for DSLs and Model Driven Development: an overview of best practices formulated by Markus Voelter with some additional remarks.
• Business Agility through Model Driven Development: a transcript and the slides of my TED-style talk answering the question how to align dynamic organizations and software.

April

• Code Generation 2010: Lessons learned in building a Model Driven Software Factory: announcement of my upcoming talk at Code Generation 2010.
• Multi-tenancy and Model Driven Engineering, necessary assets of a Platform-as-a-Service: in-depth analysis of the cloud movement (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) with a focus on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). My conclusion: PaaS need a Model-Driven Development approach.

May

• Why a tool doesn't bring you business success: explaining the role of a 'team' in business success (instead of a sole focus on technology).

June

• Model Driven Development: Code Generation or Model Interpretation?  Advantages of code generation over model interpretation and the other way around, followed by an excellent, in-depth discussion in the comments.

July

• Lessons learned in building a Model Driven Software Factory: the slides of my Code Generation 2010 talk.
• The Future of Software Development: the future of software development will consist of cloud, MDD, and appstores.

August

• 9 questions for Jos Warmer, MDD evangelist: Jos shares his experience and talks about his opensource initiative Mod4J.

September

• 15 lessons learned during the development of a Model Driven Software Factory: a write-up of the lessons I learned in the past years during the development of an MDD tool.

October

• Model Driven Engineering, hot or not? Is MDE relevant for business success? Read the thought-ful comments to learn at what points MDE needs to grow.

November

• Model Driven Development, the end of the test profession? Write-up of my keynote at a Dutch test event. It was really nice to bridge two professions: MDD and professional testing.
• Domain Specific Modeling, enabling full code generation: book review, highly recommended!

December

• Talk at Ecole des Mines de Nantes (20-01-2011): announcement of my upcoming talk "Why there is no future for Model-Driven Development". Looking forward to it! 
• This post.

Previous year overviews:

• Blog overview 2009
• Blog overview 2008

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2 comments

Johan, thank you for a great blog. What makes me come back is that Mendix is an MDE success story and at that rather unusual one (a business process engineering application and the interpretation instead of the code generation approach). IMO these kinds of experiences are important for broad MDE adoption. However, I am curios how company Mendix develops technology Mendix. As far as I know Mendix clients cannot customize Mendix DSL, which is somewhat typical for traditional (read hardcoded) CASE tools. On the other hand, I believe you mentioned a few times that Mendix does employ MDE internally. Would it be possible to share those internal experiences?

Looking forward to your new articles in 2011!

Andriy Levytskyy (URL) - 01 01 11 - 20:53

Andriy,

Thanks for your kind words! I will try to share some of our internal experiences in 2011. Time is always the limitation ;)

Johan den Haan () (URL) - 03 01 11 - 12:21