Andrey Nechypurenko, a smart colleague of mine, recently brought up an excellent thought. If we already know a domain very well, why should we bother building model-driven generators? Couldn't we just provide an application framework instead? Indeed, each framework introduces a kind of language. It implements commonalities but also hooks to take care of variability. So, when should we use model-driven techniques and when should we better rely on frameworks?
My first assumptions were:
- A DSL is much closer to the problem domain which helps different stakeholders to participate establishing the concrete model. If stakeholder participation is essential, than a DSL might definitely be the better way.
- DSLs are (often) more productive. It is much more verbose to program against a framework than designing using a DSL. Needless to say, that we need to take the efforts for providing the generator into account.
At least in my opinion the answer could also be to use both, a framework that captures the domain's core abstractions and a generator that generates applications on top of this framework.
Any thoughts about these issues?
3 comments:
yes. the combination of both is best practice in the MDSD community.
yes. the combination of both is best practice.
Is this combination really best practice? Will MDSD tool providers deliver such frameworks with their products?
Ernesto
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