Thank you for joining the webinar!
Please see below answers to the questions asked during the webinar. If we missed some of the questions feel free to contact us.
| Q: | Can you support us in defining the DSM language and generator? |
| A: | MetaCase provides consulting services to help you develop
all parts of your DSM solution. Some customers want a turn-key solution,
others want to do it all on their own, and most are in between: we are
happy to help however you want. Our consultants have unrivalled experience
and credentials, helping you achieve not just a modeling language, but one
that raises your productivity by hundreds of percent.
Based on our experience the best first step is often to run a proof-of-concept workshop. The goal of the workshop is to define and implement a small, but still significant, part of your domain-specific modeling language. The results of the workshop are a partial modeling and code generation environment, allowing you to model on a higher level of abstraction and automatically generate exactly the same kind of code you currently write by hand. This will give you concrete examples in your own domain, showing executives and developers the benefits of DSM and helping them evaluate its applicability to your situation. |
| Q: | Do you have further public examples? |
| A: | DSMforum.org shows public cases from various application domains and the MetaCase references page describes some cases in more detail. When it comes to pure language examples there are a number of examples here, and the evaluation version of MetaEdit+ includes several working DSM languages and generators. The evaluation version is downloadable here and the manuals for some cases can be viewed from the support pages, with more detail available in the DSM book (Wiley 2008). |
| Q: | Do the language designer and/or the model editor integrate with source control tools? |
| A: | Yes, both the metamodel and models can be put into source control tools. Generated code can also be stored in version control if desired. |
| Q: | Is the 150€ Introductory License a full MetaEdit+? |
| A: | Yes, it is. The Introductory License is the complete MetaEdit+ Workbench 4.5. More details here. |
| Q: | Can we trace back a single source line back to its generator? |
| A: | Yes with Generator Debugger tool. It not only shows how to trace back to the generator but also trace back to the model and individual model element from which the code is generated. |
| Q: | What are the competitors for MetaEdit+ and how do you think MetaEdit+ competes with them? What is better or worse for each? |
| A: | MetaEdit+ offers users a level of modeling tool functionality and reliability that is years ahead of the competition, and proven to give results in practice. A more detailed feature list is available to compare tools. |
| Q: | How do you compare MetaEdit+ with other modeling and code generation tools? What features or functions make it different than others? |
| A: | See above |
| Q: | Typical cost of a five-seat team? |
| A: | Please see the pricing for options. |
| Q: | What are the benefits of your DSM approach vs. UML, where one uses UML for which a code-generator is already provided by the tool in use? |
| A: | If you already have a tool that satisfies your modeling and
code generation needs then obviously you should continue to use them.
However, if the generated code is not meeting your requirements, does not
integrate with your existing libraries and other code or the performance
of the generated code is not adequate DSM gives you full control over the
code generation.
Another reason to consider using DSM rather than UML is the higher level of abstraction that domain-specific languages provide. The use of domain-specific concepts allows to check for model consistency and completeness better, makes it easier to involve domain experts in the modeling, and most importantly requires less modeling work leading to faster development. |