Last week I had the pleasure to talk at the MBEES conference in Dagstuhl. Markus Völter and I had written a paper on textual DSLs for the automotive domain. Dagstuhl conferences have a very nice atmosphere: They conference center is partially located in an old castle. The three days conference had very interesting talks and a lively discussion.

I especially enjoyed the fact, that a few participants from the automation domain took part. Professor Epple from the RTWH Aachen held an enthusiastic talk about modelling in automation and added a lot of interesting perspectives to the discussion. In the talks, I was surprised to find a Prolog Transformation Engine for EMF. It was introduced by Bernhard Schätz from TU Munich and is used for design space exploration. Several talks were related to railway safety. Such talks are usually fun, since everybody can relate to the topic due to his own experiences with the railway. Another topic was product lines and variant management. Markus Völter has already done some very interesting work for OAW and now others are thinking along the same lines.

It was an interesting conference and it brought some fresh ideas.

The guys over at UML China have released a new version of their list of UML and MDA tools (it is not a tool comparison). The list is easily comprehensible, even if you don’t speak Chinese. The third column specifies the license, and if you are looking for open source tools, look for “开源”. Hint: the first character consists of four lines, you can easily find those entries).

Topcased, Papyrus UML and oAW are missing and I asked the team to include it in the next version of the list.