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As of today I have finished my study of applied informatics at the FHTW Berlin (University of Applied Sciences). The last exam I had to pass was the oral presentation of my diploma thesis. After an hour with a high level of adrenalin I must say that the effort I have invested into the thesis and the presentation payed off. Thanks to all thesis readers and presentation listeners ho have not been named – I’ve got full marks for both.

During the last days I have prepared a paper about the thesis for the MDSE 2008 workshop in Berlin. After my two MetamodelDoc presentations this would be my third public talk but the first in English. I look forward to see you there.

Update: The thesis is now available for download in the Publications section.

I am happy to announce that I have finished the writing part of my diploma thesis and that everything has been bundled and filed to the university.

The thesis was written about the creation of a graphical editor for a model driven software development process. The abstract follows below:

„base“ is a model-driven software development environment for internal use by „b+m Informatik GmbH Berlin“. For editing models in „base“ a tree-based editor has been used in the past, which builds on the Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF). A tree representation in particular is difficult to manage for the dataflow model, because conceptionally the model represents a graph in the mathematical sense of the word. The objective of this thesis was essentially optimizing the developmental process in „base“. To this end, a graphic editor for dataflow models was developed on the basis of the Graphical Modelling Framework (GMF). The meta-model, on which the dataflow models are based, contains 20 element types, which can be placed directly in the editor’s drawing area. The complexity of the models used in GMF increases over proportionally though with the number of element types and is consequently difficult to administrate. This was the reason for developing „GenGMF“ instead of implementing a graphic editor with GMF itself. „GenGMF“ is a Domain Specific Language with an appropriate generic model-to-model transformation for the automatic construction of GMF models. The dataflow editor was modeled using this new development for the construction of graphic editors. Using „GenGMF“ for development of the dataflow editor allowed construction of a „GenGMF“ model requiring 72% less model elements than generated GMF models. In addition, it did not have to be manually adjusted. The result is ease of use for presentation in the graphic dataflow editor.

If you have any questions regarding the thesis, „GenGMF“ or „base“ just send me a note.

The image shows a white board in our mathematics course. The basics of Information Technologies and Mathematics could be traced back to the stone age starting with ordinal numbers. The four man only need to set up a hierachy in the group. The databases (the wifes gathering information abount herbs and everything else) resides in the server room (the cave and the near environment). They need cardinal numbers to count the Mushrooms for the soup.