Last week, Edward Bakker started summarizing some notes and resources on Software Factories, then Jezz Santos added this one on "When would you build one". (Their latest posts have a cyclic dependency, by the way :) I don't know if people (apart from these two guys. They're already into it to their neck :) are more talkative on SF notion lately or my doors of perception are more open to this kind of posts since I'm trying to build one myself, but I started seeing more and more on this subject.

I remember seeing a discussion between Grady (an IBM Fellow, as his blog says) and Greenfield, Cook, Wills and Kent on the UML vs SF kind of debate (and I assure you I didn't have a clue back then how important things they're talking on). Then I interested in code generation. Then I had to use NHibernate for a little project. Then I wanted to generate .hbm.xml documents in VS. Then I thought I prefer attribute decorations rather than XML declarations. Then I found out DSL Tools in this post (Sequence ended in mid 2006. Quite late for me, huh?).

Now, with DSL Tools in hand, I feel like I can take over the world :) Seriously, check the comments for this post. People want tools for their everyday needs. Put some guidance in, integrate with the IDE and they're willing to do the rest. Learning curve might be a little steep but anybody dreaming a tool to generate some code or project instruments or a custom domain intelligent enough to do some repetitive / predefined work may start building it right now or use existing ones, be it DSL Tools, GAT / GAX or one of the available software factories.