Intentional Software

Language Workbench Competition at CodeGen 2011

The 2011 edition of the annual Code Generation Conference in Cambridge, UK, had taken its own motto “raise your level of abstraction” to heart, stepping back from the focus on code generation to a broader picture. 

Concretely, several sessions discussed what further interesting and valuable things could be done with models that are otherwise often seen as just the input models to a code generation process. Visualization and domain level verification are examples of such operations as there is value in catching errors earlier and giving error messages in a language that users of the input model can understand. Another observation from the conference is that while input models are still edited in the form of diagrams (UML and other notations), text based Domain Specific Languages (DSL) seem to be gaining momentum as an alternative.

Code generation is of course still an important topic at the CodeGen conference, but the abstraction level is definitely being raised. It therefore felt natural that this years’ conference had been extended from three days of speaker led sessions to include a fourth day dedicated to a side-by-side comparison of language workbenches, called the Language Workbench Competition.

Each participant showed how their workbench implemented a predefined set of requirements for a small example language dealing with entities and entity instances. In keeping with the general theme, code generation played only a part and more time was spent discussing how the input code for the new language could be edited, validated and meaningfully combined with other languages.

Each participant would also get a chance in the final, “freestyle” part of their demos to show some particular features about their tools that made them unique. For Intentional Software, I showed an example where an expression language (built for the general part of the assignment) could be evaluated and tested with the results presented to the user as an integrated part of the code editor. 

I also showed examples of the Intentional Domain Workbench supporting multiple projections, where the code for the new language could be edited in a notation that mixes text, graphics and tables together, giving the user an experience more like editing a Word document than a text based DSL in Visual Studio or Eclipse. You can see detailed descriptions of all the entries here (direct link to entry by Intentional Software here).

While the organizers concluded that it was not really a competition as no winners would be announced, it was a fun and inspiring day where I feel I won a lot by going. Thanks to the organizers of both the Language Workbench Competition and the Code Generation Conference for a great week!

/Mats Helander

We're Hiring! Also interns!

We are now engaged in more and more pilot projects with customers. It's fantastic to see the creativity of what can be achieved once knowledge is structured and managed properly. We have a steady stream of new projects coming our way and we now need to ramp up!

So we're hiring both software product engineers that work on our core technology, and also application engineers that work on applications of our technology, often together with specific customers. You can find the details on our Careers page. 

We're also welcoming interns this summer! If you have ideas of what to do, great, send them our way. Otherwise we have several ideas for interns to work on. 

If you, or someone you know, are interested, please send a cover letter with your resume to us.

Out of This World Software Engineering

Fortune magazine recently published an article, Out of This World Software Engineering, that highlights our efforts here at Intentional Software. It discusses the idea of knowledge procesing, a topic we will come back to later here on this blog. Charles Simonyi:

 "Of course we've already helped knowledge workers with information processing," says Simonyi. "But imagine if you could record knowledge and perform operations on knowledge instead of just information."

The article also captures our goals fairly well:

Intentional is working on a process that would enable experts in a given field to apply their expertise in a way that would create software programs quickly and automatically. Most important, those experts (lawyers, pension consultants, teachers) could process their knowledge without being able to write software code. By making knowledge processing more efficient, Simonyi says, software development would become less error-prone and much cheaper.

As we have discussed many times, we are NOT trying to replace programmers. Quite the contrary, programmers are still involved, but their work are different. They are enablers and facilitators for domain experts building software. Rather than being translators between the gap of never ending business needs and software code, programmers become accellerators and bridge builder of said gap. They build the meta-program of the program the domain expert wants. By the way, even if we tend to focus on software development, operationalizing knowledge has many other application areas, lab instructions, operations and procedures manuals, insurance policies, legal contracts, and educational material to mention a few. Just imagine what could be done with recorded knowledge that was processable. So much more productivity and innovation from a new type of knowledge worker!

ThoughtWorks Technology Radar

We have had a close relationship with ThoughtWorks for several years here at Intentional. They have been following us closely as they are very interested in the potential of the Intentional technology. ThoughtWorks Technical Advisory Board consists of a group of senior technical leaders within ThoughtWorks. They produce the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar to help decision makers understand emerging technologies and trends that affect the market today.

In their August 2010 Technology Radar they discuss Intentional as an emerging technology that is now entering the Assess ring. Here is what they say:

ThoughtWorks has been working with Intentional Software for the past several years, and we are thrilled at the recent limited availability and production use of the Intentional Domain Workbench. We believe this technology represents a radical departure from the traditional software development approach. We place this technology in the assess ring, since we believe that it is time to begin exploring the application of Intentional’s technology in proofs of concept.

Indeed we are starting to apply the Intentional technology to real world situations with encouraging results. We still have engineering work to do, but for real applications we are now seeing our vision becoming reality. Very exciting times!

We continue to seek pilot projects for the technology, and I hope in 2011 we can discuss more broadly our experiences. Feel free to contact us if you want to participate!

Software Engineering Radio

Software Engineering Radio is a great podcast for anyone interested in some deeper discussions on various software technologies. We were invited to discuss the Intentional system in more detail. Shane Clifford from Intentional Software is interviewed by Markus Völter. Enjoy it here.

Intentional Software at Work

Our presentation from QCon San Francisco is now posted here.We start with an introduction and then show two example domains - Electronics and "Building Permits on Rails".

The "Building Permits on Rails" section is from a real pilot project we are doing. As I mention in the beginning, the Building Permit domain code is a mock of the real domain code since we are not allowed to talk about the specific domain code yet. But the domain schema (Forms, Interviews, Tables), projections and transformations are all real. Real is also the implementation target domains of Rails, XHTML and Ruby.

The real domain expert in this project is a lawyer with very deep and specialized legal domain knowledge in the specific legal domain that we are targeting. He has never written any software code before this nor has he ever written any software specifications. But now he is writing all of the domain code himself (hundreds of pages) and from his domain code the full application is generated. I hope we can talk about the domain later this fall when the end application is planned to be launched.

Public Events

This fall we are giving a few public talks and demos of what we are up to here at Intentional Software. We will be at:

• JAOO 2009, October 5-7, Aarhus, Denmark
• QCon 2009, November 18-20, San Francisco, USA

I'm not sure if any of these events will be recorded.

Stop by and say hello!

Public Intentional Demo

We just had the pleasure of presenting at the DSL Developer's Conference organized by Chris Sells at Microsoft. This event was a good opportunity to give a public update on our progress here at Intentional Software. You can see our presentation and demo here and here are the slides.

Martin Fowler did a nice write up about Intentional and so did Larry O'Brien for SDTimes.

Lots of great conversations after the conference. Here are some more blogs:Markus Völter, Ted Leung, Bradford Cross. And many others, for example here, here and here.

People are asking me about the availability of the Intentional Domain Workbench. At this point we are making it available to dedicated pilot projects across a wide range of domains. Since the system and approach is so different from anything else most developers are used to, we want to ensure we can support all of them properly. The learning curve is not that huge, but the shift in mindset is. Once you "get it", Intentional is actually pretty straight forward. So we want to make sure we have the bandwidth to support this shift in mindset among early adopters. I hope after these first pilot projects we will have a core community that can evolve into a broader, open community.

If you are interested in trying the Intentional Domain Workbench in a pilot project, drop me an email with some details of your project.

Next up is to give a similar update in Europe. This week we will present at Software Engineering Today in Zurich. Stop by and say hello!