Life can be fairly unfair in one perspective, or unfairly fair in another perspective.
One experience in his/her life may change his/her entire life.
It may be true in the academic life, too.
I was using DECDesign for modelling the visual representation of SRE(Software Re/reverse-engineering Environment) at Penn and CCCC, USA, for 5 years, from 1992 to 1996.
DECDesign was a remarkable meta-CASE tool to develop a CASE tool for software engineering.
During this period, I and my colleagues developed the SRE tool for SW re/reverse engineering of numerous complex systems.
Especially we processed millions lines of classified US Navy's mission-critical SW and OS for re- and reverse-engineering.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of 1996, DEC gave up DECDesign due to the downsizing of research teams caused by their financial problems.
If I recall, DECDesign had been developed by DEC over 10 years, investing billions of dollars with more than 50 PhD computer scientists and programmers.
The investment might be roughly more than 10 million dollars per year.
It might have cost DEC more than 100 millions dollars overall in total.
At that time, DEC was about to release the first commercial version of DECDesign.
The future of DECDesign looked very promising since there were more than 3000 customers using just the beta version of it.
The customers would have paid tens of thousands dollars to purchase the commercial version.
And the yearly license fee would be thousands of dollars.
Once it had been released and commercialized, all investment would have been rewarded in several years, depending on marketing strategy.
I couldn't understand the decision of DEC on DECDesign at that time.
Later I heard that DECDesign had been sold to Teamwork.
And Teamwork never released DECDesign, but, interestingly, just abolished it.
This could be a basic strategy how big IT companies dealt with their competitors.
After I came to the university in Korea, I tried to establish the similar platform for SRE and its related research and works.
But there was no meta-CASE tool that satisfied the requirements of SRE and its related.
For example, Meta-Dome or Dome and other tools did not have the full features of meta-CASE like DECDesign to develop SRE.
And their description languages were not as efficient as that of DECDesign, that is, MIF (Methodology Implementation Facility).
It implied that I had to develop SRE by not using any meta-CASE tool at all.
It was hard and took too much time for me to develop each component of SRE.
For example, it took couple years just to develop a visual editor for SRE.
And there was no consistency of such works due to the lack of both commitment by the long-term graduate students and the technical and financial supports.
For example, Jinho, the best programmer in our lab, spent 3~4 years just to develop the prototype of SAVE for specification and pre-analysis of his Onion.
One of the main causes for such a long period of the development was the difficulty of developing the visual editors and tool for each phase of the SAVE processes just by using Java and its components.
I was about to quit my research and works.
I was about to go back to the normal life before doing nothing but thinking.
Only thing that I could do was just to formalize the approaches for SAVE and SRE.
But it was not good enough for me.
I was eager for something like DECDesign.
Fortunately, in 2013, ADOxx came to me with Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis.
I met him at COMPSAC in Kyoto.
We had the same session and he made a presentation on ADOxx.
He introduced ADOxx as a meta-modeling tool.
I understood it as a kind of a meta-CASE tool, similar to DECDesign.
He sent me papers and offered a free training in his OMiLab at the University of Vienna.
Fortunately I had a quick learner, Yeongbok, and the fund from the SSDRC ITRC.
I and Yeongbok flied to Vienna in November of 2013 for the training.
After training and investigation, I concluded that I could use ADOxx like DECDesign to develop the full version of SAVE as well as SRE.
Now I am sure that I can transform all the works of SRE and the components of the Java-based SAVE into the SAVE on ADOxx.
I think I can translate and update all the works that I have done in the university so far into the SAVE just in two years.
This is the power of the ADOxx meta-modeling platform, just like the DECDesign meta-CASE tool.
Now I can be alive, just as in 20 years ago at both Penn and CCCC!
I truly thank to Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis for this opportunity.
I truly thank to my graduate students, Yeongbok and Sunghyun, for working together to develop SAVE on ADOxx.
I guarantee that they will be the best experts about ADOxx in Korea and East Asia.
I truly thank to Prof. Jinyoung Choi for the initial fund from the SSDRC ITRC to participate the training and the school.
One day, I would be able to pay them with the SAVE and other tools on ADOxx in openness for their contributions.
- Moon Kun Lee
(2015/4/9)