Richard,
I am, of course, aware of the MDA effort. Ideed, I will give the keynote at 
their upcoming ECMDA-FA conference in November. I expect to get a great 
deal of useful information there.

My starting point is an old hobbyhorse. I believe that business 
organization should own the information, including the programs. This means 
that the system structure in some way should correspond to the organization 
structure.  So the Web Services initiative is dear to my heart.

Another hobbyhorse is the separation of business information from the tools 
(GUI) the users apply to solve business tasks, including programming. (My 
original MVC is one example.) I often find  many-to-many associations 
between tool objects and information objects. It is still an open question 
if it is feasible with a seamless approach without ending up with sphagetti 
at some level.

I protect myself by saying "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with 
facts". Joking aside, I collect issues like a stamp collector collects 
stamps. I try to resolve one issue at the time, realizing that my original 
ideas will need many fundamental revisions. But I DO believe we need a new 
discipline of programming. The present state of affairs is simply not 
acceptable and it must be resolved with improved structures.

My gut feeling is that the QuA and BabyUML projects are approaching the 
same problem from different perspectives and that they could end up at the 
same place when all is said and done.

Regards
--Trygve


At 18:58 23.09.2005, you wrote:
>Trygve, I applaud this effort to close the gap between design and 
>implementation.  I learned the distinction between an objects design 
>"role" and its implementation "class" from your book "Working with 
>Objects".  I agree that it is still a huge problem to rely on programmers 
>to realized design constraints expressed in a separate (e.g. UML) 
>language, if at all.
>
>I have two main comments.  First, your short document ignores related work 
>like the Model Driven Architecture work of the OMG.  While you may not 
>have the time to follow all such work, you might find a very knowledgeable 
>audience to critique your BabyUML work through Jan Øyvind Aagedal at SINTEF.
>
>Second, I believe the biggest challenge in translating design to 
>implementation is architectural tradeoffs to achieve extra-functional 
>(QoS) properties.  Where OO design is concerned with the semantics of 
>communication between objects, much of our implementation is concerned 
>with the look and feel of a GUI or the scalability of algorithms to access 
>persistent data.   These architectural tradeoffs are typically made in the 
>context of a particular user environment or assumptions about the 
>deployment resources and loads.  As a consequence, they are generally 
>orthogonal to the primary functional decomposition.  In AOP terms, these 
>are cross-cutting concerns.  If a programmer must specify how to resolve 
>these architectural tradeoffs in BabyUML, then I expect BabyUML will be 
>little better than a visual programming language; it will fail to untangle 
>your spaghetti.  Our research in the QuA project 
>(http://home.simula.no:8888/QuA/) suggests that design must be broken up 
>into small components that are pieced together through architectural 
>decisions by either a software architect/engineer, or perhaps by an 
>automated "service planner".
>
>I look forward to hearing more about BabyUML.
>
>Richard Staehli
>
>On Tuesday, September 20, 2005, at 01:10 AM, 
>squeak-dev-request at lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:
>
>>BabyUML is a coherent multi-language discipline
>>      for coding object interaction and objects/classes.
>>
>>An overview has been posted:
>>      http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/2005/babyuml/newdiscipline.pdf
>>
>>Sorry, folks - it's long (10 pages).
>>
>>The title may be a show stopper:
>>Towards A New Discipline of Programming
>>
>>Enjoy
>>--Trygve
>>
>>P.S.
>>I have, of course, started building BabyUML an extension of Squeak,
>>but it does not appear to be a realistic task for a one-person team.
>>More about that when I see the response to this opener (if any).
>>
>>--
>>
>>Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
>>Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
>>N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
>>Norway
>


-- 

Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
Norway