Man, I love RSS. Now Rolling Stone supports RSS. This is getting really good.

Another great site to check out is Technorati.

I got my hard copies of the book in the mail last Friday. Now Manning has them on-sale. At long last, hard copies!

One solution for getting Apache, MySQL and PHP (AMP) on a Wintel box quickly is CygWin, which is a Unix shell that sits on top of Windows and has easy installs for almost every Unix utility you can think of. Another is EJB Solutions, which, despite it's name, has auto-install solutions for LAMP. I'm sure there are others.

Fink is an auto-installing solution for Mac OS X.

Mark Hofmann turned me on to this MDA introductory article.

When I published Eric's article on generating PHP with Ruby I didn't expect that two days later I would get an email from Francesco Aliverti-Piuri that he had re-written the generator in his SoProMach. That's really cool.

This demonstrates two things to me:

1. How motivated the code generation community is.
2. That PHP is an excellent generation target.

PHP is amazing because it's so inexpensive to run. All you need is Apache, MySQL and PHP and you can run a web site or service. On OSX this is a simple package installer deal, you download the packages and boom, you have everything installed. I think there is something similar on Windows, but all I could find was this tutorial.

Compuware started their big push on the release of their 3.0 version of OptimalJ today. I would have said more before but there was lots of hush-hush super-sensitive type information that they might have sued me if I had released earlier. I think the coolest part is the study that the Middleware Company did that shows a 30% increase in productivity with MDA over hand-coding.

Sure there are lots of cool new features in OptimalJ, but I'm not using OptimalJ at the moment, so it means zippo to me personally. However, if you are an MDA guy or an OptimalJ user you will want to read the interview that I got with them. The interview is here.

The interview is marketing-heavy, but you have to expect that from big companies. I try to get them to let their hair down a little, but I have to say this one was a little rushed because I wanted to get it out on the 21st for them. I'll probably have them back for another interview later. It's obvious that they are a big player in the MDA space, and looking to be the major player. MDA is one of the four cornerstones of their business strategy.

One of the neatest things about being an advocate for something, like code generation, is hearing from people about success stories. I got a really cool one from a guy at Microsoft who said they used CG to build XML persistence handlers for their XBOX game Brute Force. Turns out the book has exactly that model of generation as an example in the data handling chapter. It's just cool to know that the technique is part of a game!

Eric Rollins (my database access chapter co-author) retargeted his J2EE generator to build PHP instead. Then he wrote an article about it. Nice.

Code Generation in Action is now on sale from Manning as an ebook. The print edition will come out in the next couple of weeks.

I put up a new special section on MDA last night with the help of Felix Reussel. MDA is definitely worth a look if you are going to be building a new Java or .NET database application and you use UML modeling.

If it seems like it's been a little quiet on the CGN site, let me assure you that it is the calm before the storm. I'm currently working on a brand new MDA hub page which will be a focal point of our information on MDA. In addition to that I have a huge number of interviews coming up:

• Stefan Tilkov of innoq on his iQgen MDA generator
• Daniel Cazzulino of the NMatrix project
• David Frankel, author of Model Driven Architecture: Applying MDA to Enterprise Computing
• Mike Williams on vDoclet
• Anneke Kleppe, co-author of MDA Explained: The Model Driven Architecture--Practice and Promise
• Stephanie Miller of Iron Speed
• Krzysztof Czarnecki, author of Generative Programming
• Craig Cleaveland, author of Program Generators with XML and Java.

And if that wasn't enough my co-author on my database generation chapter is writing an article on his port of the generator from J2EE to PHP.

Plus Mark Hofmann and I are collaborating on an article on MDA which compares the different generators by applying them all to a simple test case application.

Oh, yeah, and then there is the book, which comes out as an ebook next week and I'll have a special blurb on the site about that.

What has been lost is my article on the writing of the book, which I know is on my tiBook somewhere. Oh, well, maybe when everything settles down.

In about two months I reckon we will be the number one source of information about code generation on the planet. Which is sorta saying a lot, and not a lot, all at the same time. <g>

If you are a software engineer and you are interested in reading my book and would review it on Amazon, please let me know. My publicist is looking to disperse some free pre-release copies.

This is great comparitive resource for programming languages.

I launched the author's site for the book. The front page is a little heavy, but the rest of the pages are lightweight. The code downloads for the book are up there. I'll post sample chapters if I am able to.