I’ve started a few days ago the ABSE/AtomWeaver Early Access Program, a closed alpha test of the AtomWeaver IDE, where a select few professionals participate. More than twenty professionals and two tech reporters have been selected.

The objective of the Early Access Program is to get valuable early feedback from professionals that are actively engaged in Model-Driven Software Generation, or code generation in general. With this controlled alpha release, AtomWeaver has seen the real world, and real developers are putting their hands on this new approach to software development.

While most people have yet to report back, some justifying to be severely constrained by their current work, I am starting to get reactions on their first “impact” with ABSE.

I’ve yet to receive a neutral or negative comment about ABSE, which is encouraging. First reactions have been positive, with adjectives varying from “interesting” to “promising”.

I am also learning a lot about how to properly convey the ideas and philosophy behind ABSE, in terms of documentation and tutorials. As with any new, disruptive technology, newcomers always feel confused about the new concepts, and hardly know where to start or where to go. It is a challenging task to put ourselves in the shoes of a newcomer when we are precisely on the opposite side of the knowledge scale. This is called “the curse of knowledge“.

Starting today I will everyday (or so) post a simple fact about ABSE and a short text regarding that fact, in ABSE/AtomWeaver’s community site at Ning.

I hope this series to be a very simple and easy way for developers to get acquainted with ABSE, to know what it can do, and what they can accomplish with it. It won’t take you more than two minutes per day.

New post announcements will be added to ABSE/AtomWeaver’s twitter account, and the fact pages can be found inside the ABSE section of the community site.

I take the opportunity to invite those that want to learn about ABSE and follow its evolution, to join its official community at http://atomweaver.ning.com.

Today is a big day for me and for ABSE: This is the day that shows to the world, through its official site at abse.info, what ABSE is all about, and what it can bring to the software engineering community. It has been almost three years since I started working on the definitive implementation of an easy and productive way to develop and maintain software.

OK, so the current website is a little short on details, but not short on propaganda ! That’s because the first task will be to evangelize the developer community and not to have the technology reviewed by industry experts. ABSE is still in its infancy, and a lot will evolve and change in the coming years. However, ABSE 1.0 will give you plenty of rope to play with (and hang yourself as some would say) and give you a glimpse of the future.

Some people in the software engineering community are now saying that model-driven software development will be mainstream in three years from now, and I am happy to be one of the visionaries that is working on that edge.

For now the ABSE website contains a lot of details about the methodology’s meta-metamodel, the Atom, and many application scenarios. I guess explaining a new philosophy to the crowds will require lots of tinkering with the message I want to pass on, so I’ll have to keep working on the site’s content improvement.

Also AtomWeaver is not far away. Participants in the Early Access Program will receive an alpha version in November, while a beta/CTP version is expected for January 2010.

The start of the coming decade will see a turning point in software engineering. I am happy to be contributing for that with ABSE and AtomWeaver.

I’ve started the ABSE/AtomWeaver EA (Early Access) program a few days ago. This is a restricted group of people that I considered to be relevant to have an early look at ABSE and AtomWeaver. This group is composed of industry-recognized professionals, research people at big companies, but also independent professionals.

People on the Early Access Program can have a first look at this new technology. In return I ask for some neutral feedback.

The first material to be available was a combined slide-style presentation of ABSE and AtomWeaver. The presentation gives a rather limited view of ABSE, and trying to understand ABSE through some slides is still a challenge at this point. However, feedback has been essentially positive, with some people having some doubts about its effectiveness due to their lack of understanding of ABSE’s mechanics.

Most feedback ranges from “promising” to “impressive”, which leaves me confident about ABSE’s official debut in Q1 2010. Stay tuned!

This is my historical note about ABSE, Atom-Based Software Engineering, and how a simple idea evolved into a new Model-Driven Software Development methodology.

I’ve been for years researching ways to develop software in a way that I would be more productive, more organized, more effective. After a first attempt in 2000-2001, and with limited, isolated ideas for a couple of years, a “click” came around 2005 that took me on a trip to a new way of thinking about software development.

I was thinking of a more declarative way to do things. I was thinking in not doing the same things over and over again. I was thinking of transforming my development experience into an automated library. Essentially, I wanted to duplicate myself. I wanted to have the work strength of a small team.

This was the initial rationale behind the development of ABSE. I wanted to have a model of my software project and then, by the switch of some buttons, I would be able to change code, and this code would adjust itself to the specification I ordered. And things could be specified at an unlimited higher- or lower-level. A project would be made of some or millions of small things… and the ABSE Atom was born.

ABSE first evolved as CodeGen4, a simple string-substitution template-based system. Then I thought it would be much powerful if each Atom could be a program in itself. This way the model could “think” according to the specification. Cool! Many new things could now be done.

In January 2007 I started building an IDE that would help me fulfill this dream of mine. A few months later I abandoned the IDE’s development and started again. But this time I wanted to do it right: The IDE should be built using an ABSE model! But how? I didn’t have a tool to build an ABSE model… So I used Leo, a scriptable outline editor. After many hours building scripts and auxiliary tools, I was able to develop AtomWeaver, an IDE that implements ABSE, using ABSE!

I knew that many hours would be spent developing code and scripts that would be thrown to the electronic dumpster once AtomWeaver would become usable. But software development is sometimes like that: you must give one step backward so that you can give two steps forward.

ABSE and AtomWeaver are currently being polished to a point that they can be understood, used, supported, (and I hope) loved by the community. The initial release is near. Stay tuned!