TheServerSide.com(or .net) has said goodbye to its days as the main source for information on (mainstream) new development technologies but after a huge silence it finally has put some cool stuff online. Just watched this cool (Real Media) video in which Fowler and Ford talk about the -IMHO- hottest topic around: Domain Specific Languages.

I’ve been following the DSL buzz for a while and it’s something I really believe on. It’s nice to see how people are finally seeing how this can shift the whole software development thing, it was not easy to get to this point. In 2006 I gave a presentation at the Rio Java Summit conference on the topic. The subject was my choice but I got a real problem choosing the approach to present the concept, so I focused on the application of JVM languages (at that time this was a short for Groovy) solving day-by-day problems.

I had just finished a system that would monitor and configure a whole bunch of Microsoft Windows based clusters that run my them employer system. The little administration thing was written in Ruby (no Rails) and I choosed to apply DSL principles from the very beginning. Since I was in a Java conference (worse: I was JUG Leader for Rio de Janeiro Java User Group) I skipped the little detail that the system wasn’t written int hat platform. These were the Rails-rising days and every Java programmer was hearing that Java was dead, it won’t be wise to mix feelings and new concepts.

In 2007 I had a chance to repeat the experience, this time at the tech talks hold in my company. I’ve basically followed Neal Ford’s presentation structure that I saw in Dr. Dobbs 2007 conference and focused on Fluent Interfaces rather than DSLs.

The audience again was basically made of Java programmers, most at junior level, so I showed them the work we were developing there in writing WebService client interfaces using Fluent Interfaces and the DSL-based internal framework.

At first I thought it was a huge failure, people was probably expecting more magic and got specially sad when I said that I don’t know a real good tool for writing DSLs (yes, I know MetaCase’s, Microsoft’s, JetBrains’ and the like) and would stick with Internal DSLs for production systems most of the time since I wouldn’t like to deal with a parser/interpreter/compiler at this point. I’ve also learned that is no good to tell people that are learning this wonder thing named Java that it is not the bleeding edge… for about five years.

I was wrong. Although the junior guys left the room expecting that at least the coffee break would be good I got lots of questions and interest from senior level developers and architects. I created the interest, that was my target.

But I really wish I had watch this TSS presentation before. F&F starts easily but go straight to the point, that was really nice.