Virtual Meetup - "Generative Objects and the META low code approach : a full model-driven workbench for creating low code platforms"

Hi Community,

I am happy to announce that this Thursday (the 7th of April), Walter Almeida will hold the discussion about " Generative Objects and the META low code approach: a full model-driven workbench for creating low code platforms ".

Also, remember that we changed the link to join the Meetup!

Low code platforms empower people to build applications with minimum or no technical knowledge. However, the applications that can be built are limited to the kind of applications a given low code platform was designed for, mainly data driven web applications. And the generated applications are limited to follow the built-in architecture and design.

Generative Objects pioneers the ā€œmeta low codeā€ approach, rocketing the versatility and power of the original low code approach to a whole new level.

The meta low code approach empowers developers to have full control over the application meta-model and the architecture and design of the generated applications. The application meta-model is the high level, functional language that the low code platform is exposing to non-technical users to create applications in a low code way.

Developers can now :

  • Enrich and extend the original Generative Objects meta-model and associated generation templates, to extend the low code platform itself to meet their specific needs.
  • Create full new application meta-models, and associated generation templates. Developers can now literally create full-fledged specific low code platforms, to target any kind of application, design and architecture

Non-tech users can then use the specific low code platform, created by the developers

During this presentation, Walter will walk us through a full demonstration of the steps for creating a new low code platform using Generative Objects, exploring the self-reflectiveness of the platform (Generative Objects is modelled and generated by itself) that enables this META approach.

Walter has always been passionate about technology. After graduating as an Engineer in France, Walter worked for 13 years as a consultant developer and then architect, for various big companies in France, UK and Spain, before creating Generative Objects in 2010, with the intention to birth a technology that would accelerate the development of software, despite the overall negativity of the market at that time, judging that model driven development had failed and that L4G languages and RAD tools were the best we could get at. Since then a lot has changed and everyone is talking about low code platforms! From the start, the intention was self-reflectiveness of the platform, which is built deep in, know has the meta low code approach.

Three years ago, Walter decided to align with his deepest values of a more fair and connected world and decided to move away from focusing on big corporates (with a tenth of business applications built on Generative Objects), to open sourcing Generative Objects and putting the intention to be of service to empowers innovators and game changers to create a new range of decentralized online platforms that would power the emergence of a new economy and new ways to interoperate between humans, allowing for better distribution of wealth and encouraging the sovereignty of us all, individuals and communities.

Registration for the Virtual Meetup

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. It will also permit you to add it to your calendar.

Time

It is hosted on Zoom at 6 PM GMT+1/CEST (you can use this link to figure out which time is in your timezone: Dateful Time Zone Converter).

Event hint

I am also happy to extend the invitation to the Thematic Workshop on Systems Engineering, Wednesday 11th May at Kingā€™s College London organised by MDENet, (https://community.mde-network.org/posts/21560727).

This one-day event taking place on Wednesday 11th May as an in-person session at Kingā€™s College London aims to improve mutual understanding of research challenges and opportunities for MDE to help address problems in a particular thematic area. Our goal is that the workshop can spark collaborations between people in different areas. MDENet offers a range of funding opportunities to support the further development of such collaborations.

Cheers,
Elisa

P.S. We get a recurring question: ā€œAre presentations recorded?ā€. The answer is not, and the reasons are explained here On recording Virtual Meetups - #7 by voelter

Thank you, Strumenta folks for hosting this meetup! Also, thank you for your presentation @walter.almeida! Generative Objects seems very intriguing and Iā€™m extremely interested in understanding more about it and how to potentially generate GO applications.

Where would be a good place to discuss the open source process for GO?

1 Like

This is the chat of the session:

17:52:57 From Rene to Everyone:
	Hello!
17:53:01 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Hello!
17:58:16 From Stefan Wagner to Everyone:
	I can hear Walther
17:58:22 From David Benn to Everyone:
	I am able to hear Walter too
17:59:11 From Oscar Fernandez Sierra to Everyone:
	I can hear you, but I think you can't hear me
17:59:48 From Oscar Fernandez Sierra to Everyone:
	I can hear you, Federico
18:01:21 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Hello Everybody, Sanyaade from London
18:02:36 From David Benn to Everyone:
	Hi Sanyaade. David from Adelaide (South Australia)
18:04:30 From Gordon Morrison to Everyone:
	Hello from Ruston Louisiana, USA.
18:04:46 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Hello from Italy!
18:06:00 From Torsten Gƶrg to Everyone:
	Hello from Stuttgart in Germany.
18:06:18 From Peter Zahoran to Everyone:
	Hello from Budapest!
18:06:49 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I hope is not too late in Australia!
18:06:56 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Or too early šŸ˜„ ?
18:07:00 From David Benn to Everyone:
	1:30am ;)
18:07:15 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Wow, double thank you for joining!
18:07:59 From David Benn to Everyone:
	:)
18:08:07 From David Delgado to Everyone:
	Hello from Barcelona (Spain)
18:08:07 From Rene to Everyone:
	Are there sldes or anything? I don't see them
18:08:23 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I think Walter has not yet shared them but later we should get a demo
18:08:58 From Rene to Everyone:
	Ok, I like demos more anyway!
18:09:08 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Agreed šŸ˜„
18:12:18 From Ian Ramsay to Everyone:
	What was that distributed environment mentioned by Walter ?
18:12:30 From Thomas Villaren to Everyone:
	Holochain
18:12:59 From Torsten Gƶrg to Everyone:
	Additional information about Generative Objects is available at https://modeling-languages.com/low-code-open-source-platform-generative-objects/.
18:13:21 From Rene to Everyone:
	Can we make the font a bit bigger?
18:13:30 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	In general if you are interested in these topics you should follow the modelling-languages.com website
18:15:52 From Herman Peeren to Everyone:
	modeling with 1 L (American): modeling-languages.com
18:16:33 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Right, thank you Herman!
18:17:44 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	For the purpose of teaching, can it be used locally by students e.g on their laptops or PC?
18:17:45 From Meinte Boersma to Everyone:
	I swear I have to look up the spelling of modeling every time I use the word... (In my defence: EU projects use UK spelling, so the confusion is kind of unavoidable.)
18:18:16 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I write it randomly, so I should be right 50% of the time
18:18:53 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Sanyaade, yes, I think the platform can be run on you own machine (Walter is running it on localhost)
18:19:30 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Great!
18:21:57 From Jon Boone to Everyone:
	Does ā€œlow-codeā€ usually mean using an application like generative objects to create *and* deploy an application?
18:23:46 From HERVE MALEVILLE to Everyone:
	From a general perspective, there are other low-code approaches, but all focus on using metadata.
18:24:07 From Thiago Silva to Everyone:
	Walter, how is this different from Mendix, Appian, and other low-code platforms?
18:24:56 From Jon Boone to Everyone:
	Thanks ā€” is there a write up of the pros and cons of ā€œlow-codeā€ approach versus DSLs?
18:25:07 From Thiago Silva to Everyone:
	Great, thanks!
18:25:09 From Rene to Everyone:
	How can multiple developers work on the same met model to make changes to the generated app?
18:25:34 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Jon, I wrote an opinionated piece about that: https://tomassetti.me/when-you-need-low-code-or-no-code-and-when-you-need-dsls/
18:28:46 From Gregg Irwin to Everyone:
	Is there a way to see the GO model as a map of some kind? Seeing it for the first time, I couldn't visualize how the pieces relate, or where they live, as Walter walked through it.
18:29:42 From Jon Boone to Everyone:
	Thanks, Federico!
18:29:57 From Gregg Irwin to Everyone:
	Ah, the treeview may be the closest thing to that.
18:29:59 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Thank you for the question!
18:30:14 From Peter Zahoran to Everyone:
	can you/how can you alter the generation process itself?
18:30:41 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I noted the questions and I will ask them at the first convenient time
18:30:57 From Herman Peeren to Everyone:
	Can you also make templates for other languages?
18:30:57 From Torsten Gƶrg to Everyone:
	I.e., a comparison between the possibilities of the meta low-code approach of Generative Objects and the features provides by the JetBrains MPS language workbench would be really interesting.
18:31:20 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Torsten, I agree!
18:31:55 From Meinte Boersma to Everyone:
	Just to confirm whether I understand things correctly: GO is (completely?) meta-circular?
18:32:15 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I think so, but I will ask Walter
18:32:31 From Meinte Boersma to Everyone:
	šŸ‘
18:38:02 From Rene to Everyone:
	Ok, the meta model is shared realtime between devs currently.
18:38:13 From Peter Zahoran to Everyone:
	apparently
18:40:14 From JĆ¼rgen Mutschall to Everyone:
	As I understand GO is a top-down generation platform. Is there any debugging support based on bottom up references to the meta Level or meta data Level?
18:41:17 From Meinte Boersma to Everyone:
	It's like testing: stop talking, and there will be no more (interrupting) questions šŸ™‚
18:50:52 From Gregg Irwin to Everyone:
	As a meta tool, then, it's a low code platform for creating domain specific low code platforms.
18:51:13 From Paul Spencer to Everyone:
	is the medical questionnaire available on GitHub?
18:51:40 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I wonder if it can be shared on GitHub: I understand everything lives in the DB
18:53:44 From Gregg Irwin to Everyone:
	The generated C# project should be shareable.
18:54:41 From William Eisner to Everyone:
	Their  web site says that it generate open source projects, so it should be possible to put them on Github
18:54:50 From Peter Zahoran to Everyone:
	is there any support for refactoring the model (e.g. rename entity) ?
18:55:23 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	I think I will wait for the end of the presentation to ask all the questions
18:55:31 From David Benn to Everyone:
	Since Generative Objects would generate correct-by-design applications/models, is there any role for developer driven verification here? Or is the bulk of testing shifted to the level of the whole application (i.e. system test)?
19:06:14 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	1.) Is Go available for download GO?
	2.) Also  a technical manual on modeling/code generation with GO?
19:06:34 From David Benn to Everyone:
	Or perhaps is there a role for test case generation , e.g. to test that a survey (in your example) continues to work in the presence of changes over time?
19:06:40 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Great!
19:07:53 From HERVE MALEVILLE to Everyone:
	I've to go; thanks a lot Walter! very instructive
19:08:03 From Federico Tomassetti to Everyone:
	Thank you Herve!
19:10:27 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Great! We can have you on the community
19:14:31 From David Benn to Everyone:
	Makes sense. Thank you Walter, Federico.
19:15:47 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Thank you so much!
19:15:55 From JĆ¼rgen Mutschall to Everyone:
	Thank you very much for the presentation.
19:16:02 From Gregg Irwin to Everyone:
	Thank you Walter and Federico.
19:16:06 From David Benn to Everyone:
	Thanks again
19:16:07 From Vladyslav Hnatiuk to Everyone:
	Thank you!
19:16:07 From Thiago Silva to Everyone:
	Thanks, Walter!
19:16:10 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Thank you!
19:16:11 From Peter Zahoran to Everyone:
	Thank you, it was very informative
19:16:11 From Meinte Boersma to Everyone:
	Thank you, Walter!
19:16:13 From Oscar Fernandez Sierra to Everyone:
	bye
19:16:13 From Paul Spencer to Everyone:
	thanks you!
19:16:14 From Sanyaade Adekoya to Everyone:
	Bye1
19:16:14 From David Delgado to Everyone:
	Thank you very much!!!! Good bye

Hello @IPmonger

Thank you for your interest,
We can discuss on GO forum : https://forum.generativeobjects.com , you can join the forum and start the discussion :slight_smile:

I would be very please to welcome you and others on the projects !!

Walter

Hello everyone ! Here is an interview that was just published where I demonstrate the low code and then meta low code approach of Generative Objects : Ecosystem Sessions ā€“Ā Generative Objects - YouTube