I should have known better than to write about a vendor demo, as I did on Monday for Telelogic Rhapsody. Now everybody wants to give me a demo. As the organ-grinder's song from The Threepenny Opera goes, "Oh, the line forms at the right, dears, now that Mackie's back in town." This morning's demo was a Web meeting, since the vendor, MetaCase, is in Jyväskylä, Finland. My Plantronics DSP headset worked well, the I should have known better than to write about a vendor demo, as I did on Monday for Telelogic Rhapsody. Now everybody wants to give me a demo. As the organ-grinder’s song from The Threepenny Opera goes, “Oh, the line forms at the right, dears, now that Mackie’s back in town.”This morning’s demo was a Web meeting, since the vendor, MetaCase, is in Jyväskylä, Finland. My Plantronics DSP headset worked well, the voice quality was good, and the VoIP delay wasn’t all that bad as long as I didn’t interrupt Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, CEO of MetaCase.Dr. Tolvanen’s starting point is the proposition that Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) offers something like a 7x productivity improvement over C++ and Java, even when those languages are enhanced by UML modeling like Telelogic’s. He cited several customer quotes in support of that: Panasonic experienced a “5-fold productivity increase when compared to standard development methods”; Nokia reported module development decreasing from 2 weeks to 1 day, i.e. a 10x gain. Other customer quotes supported different perceived values: EADS cited the improved quality of generated code because of the design rules; DENSO claimed “MetaEdit+ has eliminated our need to outsource software development activities.” Dr. Tolvanen showed me a demo of a DSM for building Enterprise applications for Nokia smart phones running on Symbian (see figure at left). This particular application does conference registration. The underlying DSM knows about the capabilities and limitations of Symbian, and the code generator emits Python.Where does the high productivity come in? Only one or two hard-core developers in the company work on the code generation; most developers (hundreds at Nokia, if I understood correctly) work on applications in a high-level design view like the diagram editor shown in the figure, or an alternative view like a matrix or table.I’ve played around with Microsoft’s DSL tools, and found them to require a lot of work — weeks — to build an effective model. I assumed that was the state of the art. Apparently not.Here’s the money quote, from Laurent Safa of Matsushita, speaking about MetaEdit+: “I could define a domain-specific language in about six hours — design, testing and one failed trial included.”MetaCase can be reached by email at info@metacase.com and on the Web at www.metacase.com. Software Development