Happy New Year!

It’s now 2012 and it’s time to put ABSE and AtomWeaver on the map. On the model-driven development map, that is. 2012 will be the real dissemination year for the ABSE approach and the AtomWeaver IDE. The take-off year. Well, it should be…

This year, and for the first time, I’ll be attending the Code Generation Conference (CG2012) in Cambridge, the most important European event in this area. As of today, it’s guaranteed that I will be participating in the 2nd Language Workbench Challenge (LWC) to be held the day before the conference (March 27).

I’ve also submitted three speaker proposals for the conference. The accepted speaker results are not out yet, so the presence of ABSE/AtomWeaver could be extended beyond the LWC.

The Language Workbench Challenge was created to compare the strengths and weaknesses of modeling/language workbenches, based on solutions for a predefined set of cases. These cases are accessible to everyone, on the LWC web site.

See you at CG2012!

This is it! AtomWeaver reaches its first “official” release, the desired “1.0″ label. For many, “1.0″ means immature, but for its creators, it usually means yay! I made it!… Yep, it’s that feeling.

AtomWeaver 1.0 is the materialization of an idea I had 10 years ago: Why not creating patterns of my own development skills, so that I don’t have to repeat myself over and over? At that time, I knew nothing about model-driven development, although I have already built a small code generator ten years before that.

This idea kept coming and going over the last decade when finally I decided that I had enough ideas to try and build a “variable-driven” code generator. Three and a half years later, and after three iterations of the ABSE concept, the whole decade-long project faces the outside world.

It has been a long journey. Still, I’ve just reached the “10%” milestone. My vision for ABSE and AtomWeaver is much larger. Version 1.0 is really just the tip of the iceberg.

It has been quite a long journey… so many headaches, so much fun!

I have quietly released the first public version of AtomWeaver: 0.9.0. Why releasing it quietly if it is a commercially-oriented product? Well, because I am kind of “ashamed” of releasing it.

Some people say that “if you’re not ashamed of your first product release, then you haven’t released it soon enough”. So I followed that advice and I released as soon as I could. Well, it could have been sooner, but I thought it would be cool to release it on my birthday!

And so it happened. The first released public beta version (0.9.0) of AtomWeaver sucks, lacks lots of crucial documentation, has blatant bugs and omisions, and the website is even worse: it has just four pages and two screenshots.

But I had to push myself off the cliff, I had to release one day…

Now I will follow the mantra “release early, then iterate like crazy”. That’s what I am going to do. New releases and website updates will occur on an almost daily basis. I released 0.9.0 yesterday but I already have 0.9.1 today! The update roller coaster will begin. Hopefully the update intensity will slow down as the product reaches an acceptable state.

A new era is starting. Let me take a deep breath…