Teaching MDD and DSLs at ITU, Copenhagen

This fall I have accepted a position as extern lecturer at the IT University in Copenhagen teaching model driven development and domain specific languages. I share the position with Steen Brahe from Danske Bank - one of the major banks in Denmark - who have a very solid practical experience in GMF models.

The class runs every Monday and is a required part of the Master degree on software construction at ITU.

As the tool bench for the classes, we use Eclipse Galileo Modeling Tools, which have turned out be a very good choice as a platform, as it is both pretty solid and contains all the bits and pieces we need in the classes.

The IT University is a rather interesting place - not only from an architectural point of view - see the picture at the right - but also because the students are required to hold a bachelor degree as well as at least two years of real practical experience. This later requirement means, most of the students actually have a qualified opinion about the subjects that is taught.

The classes we teach includes the following subjects:

• OSGi
• Basic Eclipse Plug-in Structure
• MDD Theory
• EMF
• OCL
• Textual DSL design an theory
• XText
• GMF
• Model Transformations
• QVT
• Xpand
• and a number of lectures on alternatives like UML

As it can be seen, this a very mixed bag with both theory and lots of practical exercises based on the Eclipse tool bench.