Director of consulting services, Chris Raistrick will also be giving a presentation at Code Generation 2010 entitled:

"DSLs and UML: A Peaceful Co-existence"
 
DSLs and UML are often positioned as mutually exclusive alternatives for system development, and their respective protagonists have been waging verbal trench warfare for some time now, with no clear victor emerging.  However, their respective strengths, such as the wide range of highly capable tools and code generators in the case of UML, and the ability to express notions at exactly the right level of abstraction in the case of DSLs, can be combined to form a highly effective development process.
 
This presentation will illustrate how the Model Driven Architecture approach, based upon partitioning a system into domains, provides a natural framework for a coherent process synthesised from domain-specific languages and UML.  This approach, which is illustrated with examples drawn from ongoing industry projects, exploits the benefits of DSLs for representing application level constructs in an intuitive way, and uses these to populate generic UML models (metamodels for the geeks) which deliver the classic benefits of reuse, portability and upgradability, and allow exploitation of the ever-increasing capabilities of the mainstream UML tools.