A Modest Proposal

[Owl Saver]

Microsoft talks about "eating their own dog food" when they use their own products. I think Sparx should do the same thing. It would be great if a future version of EA (say 9.0) were completely designed and documented in EA.

It may be that Sparx is actually too small a company to do this. So, a few dedicated users could work with Sparx to do this over a period of time.

I would expect that the first phase of modeling and generation would identify limitations of the current product. These could be used as a major high priority input into version 8.0. Then, the modeling could be completed.

With the modeling completed, version 9.0 could be delivered.

- Does this seem feasible?
- Can anyone commit 4-8 hours a week to work on something like this?
- Would Sparx even be interested?
- Can Sparx set up the infrastructure for such a project?
- I would expect that it would take about 10 dedicated people 6 months to get to the needs for Version 8.0 stage.
- Could the IP and ownership issues be handled?

All in all, I think this would be a great show piece for what EA can do and would greatly improve the product.

Any thoughts?

[thomaskilian]

Actually there is a (part) model for EA. I got a copy some years ago and did put it on the EA User Group Site (should be still there). It contained all interfaces available in the COM interface. And rumors about a version with documentation - this one had none as it was the result of a re-engineering process. We've been wating for the documented version since...