Time to Write a Book

It seems the time has arrived for me to write a book on the Modeling project. More specifically, now that things have settled down on GMF and the QVT contribution is available in CVS, it's time to write a book on using the Modeling project as a DSL Toolkit.

Designed to complement the "EMF book" (version 2.0 is out soon!) in the same Addison-Wesley series, the book is scheduled to be completed at the end of March, 2008 and be some 500 pages long. So far, I have just about 100 pages written in draft form, so hopefully it will be a long cold winter indoors.

The book will utilize a series of DSL projects to cover in detail the development of graphical concrete syntaxes (using GMF), model-to-model transformations (using QVT Operational Mapping Language), and model-to-text transformations (using Xpand). In the future, perhaps be extended to cover concrete textual syntaxes, if and when the proposed Textual Modeling Framework project becomes a reality.

At this point, I'd be interested in the community's feedback on this book and its scope. To me, a DSL Toolkit should include all aspects of model-driven software development as they relate to a domain (semantic) model. And since the world already has an excellent book on EMF itself, it's about time we had one to cover these other important capabilities in the Modeling project.

For those attending Eclipse Summit Europe this year, Ed and I will be demoing part of the book's sample projects. In November, I'll be delivering a similar presentation at EclipseWorld. Hope to see you there!