Martin Fowler (18 December 1963) is a British
software developer
Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...
, author and international public speaker on software development, specialising in
object-oriented analysis and design,
UML
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.
The creation of UML was originally ...
,
patterns
A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated li ...
, and
agile software development
In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ...
methodologies, including
extreme programming
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, P ...
.
His 1999 book ''Refactoring'' popularised the practice of
code refactoring
In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structu ...
. In 2004 he introduced a new
architectural pattern
An architectural pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software architecture within a given context. The architectural patterns address various issues in software engineering, such as computer hardware perfor ...
, called Presentation Model (PM).
Biography
Fowler was born and grew up in
Walsall
Walsall (, or ; locally ) is a market town and administrative centre in the West Midlands County, England. Historically part of Staffordshire, it is located north-west of Birmingham, east of Wolverhampton and from Lichfield.
Walsall is t ...
, England, where he went to
Queen Mary's Grammar School
Queen Mary's Grammar School (QMGS) is a boys' grammar school with academy status located on Sutton Road, Walsall, England, about a mile from the town centre and one of the oldest schools in the country.
The sixth form is coeducational.
Admis ...
for his secondary education. He graduated at
University College London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = � ...
in 1986. In 1994 he moved to the United States, where he lives near
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the capital city, state capital and List of municipalities in Massachusetts, most populous city of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financ ...
,
in the suburb of
Melrose Melrose may refer to:
Places
United Kingdom
* Melrose, Scottish Borders, a town in the Scottish Borders, Scotland
** Melrose Abbey, ruined monastery
** Melrose RFC, rugby club
Australia
* Melrose, Queensland, a locality in the South Burnet ...
.
[Martin Fowler](_blank)
at martinfowler.com. Retrieved 2012-11-15.
Fowler started working with software in the early 1980s. Out of university in 1986 he started working in software development for
Coopers & Lybrand until 1991. In 2000 he joined
ThoughtWorks, a systems integration and consulting company,
where he serves as Chief Scientist.
Fowler has written nine books on the topic of software development. He is a member of the ''
Agile Alliance'' and helped create the
Manifesto for Agile Software Development in 2001, along with 16 fellow signatories. He maintains a ''
bliki
Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web applica ...
'', a mix of
blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...
and
wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
. He popularised the term
Dependency Injection as a form of
Inversion of Control
In software engineering, inversion of control (IoC) is a design pattern in which custom-written portions of a computer program receive the flow of control from a generic framework. A software architecture with this design inverts control as com ...
.
[Martin Fowler (2004)]
Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern
. Retrieved 2012-11-15.
Publications
* 1996. ''Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models''. Addison-Wesley. .
* 1997. ''UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language''. Addison-Wesley. .
* 1999. ''Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code'', With
Kent Beck, John Brant,
William Opdyke, and Don Roberts (June 1999). Addison-Wesley. .
* 2000. ''Planning Extreme Programming''. With
Kent Beck. Addison-Wesley. .
* 2002. ''Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture''. With David Rice, Matthew Foemmel, Edward Hieatt, Robert Mee, and Randy Stafford. Addison-Wesley. .
* 2010. ''Domain-Specific Languages''. With Rebecca Parsons. Addison-Wesley. .
* 2012. ''NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence''. With Pramod Sadalage. Addison-Wesley. .
* 2013. ''Refactoring: Ruby Edition''. With
Kent Beck, Shane Harvie, and Jay Fields. Addison-Wesley. .
* 2018. ''Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Second Edition''. Kent Beck, and Martin Fowler. Addison-Wesley. .
Domain-specific languages
In his book, ''Domain-specific languages'', Fowler discusses
Domain-specific languages, DSL. DSLs are said to be defined by being composable programming languages, with their focus on an individual domain and having limited expressively.
It is argued that DSLs can increase productivity by removing the requirement of the programmer to understand a full programming language, providing a means of communication with
domain experts, and separate the manner of execution of a task from the definition of a task itself.
These benefits are set against the cost of learning a new language and building the tools for this language, siloing that results for different languages and the abstractions used in DSLs not being suitable for a task.
Fowler introduces the concept of internal (or embedded) and external DSL, an internal DSL being a DSL that is a subset of another language and can be executed by the tools for this outer language.
Ruby
A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum (aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapp ...
and
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.
Types
* A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispi ...
are given as an example of languages where internal DSLs are common. He also introduces the idea of Semantic Model which defines the execution of a DSL.
Various examples of DSLs are presented including
graphviz, a language for specifying
graphs to be rendered; JMock a java mocking framework;
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone t ...
a language to specify stylistic elements of a website;
HQL a
object relational mapper
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ...
in
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
;
XAML
Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ) is a declarative XML-based language that Microsoft developed for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise.
XAML is used extensively ...
a language used to specify and change
graphical user interface
The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...
s; FIT, a language to express testing scenarios; and
make a tool to build software
The book discusses implementing an external DSL using tools like
parsers
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lat ...
,
lexers
In computer science, lexical analysis, lexing or tokenization is the process of converting a sequence of Character (computing), characters (such as in a computer program or web page) into a sequence of ''lexical tokens'' (String (computer science ...
,
abstract syntax tree
In computer science, an abstract syntax tree (AST), or just syntax tree, is a tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of text (often source code) written in a formal language. Each node of the tree denotes a construct occurring ...
s and
code generation referred to as "syntax-driven translation"
This is contrasted with "delimiter-driven translation" which is said to be simpler but less powerful. Here the language is simple enough to be
interpreted by splitting on delimiters and switching logic based on individual entries.
Ways of implementing internal DSLs is discussed, with attention paid to nested function calls,
sequences of function calls,
or
method chaining
Method chaining, also known as named parameter idiom, is a common syntax for invoking multiple method calls in object-oriented programming languages. Each method returns an object, allowing the calls to be chained together in a single statement ...
amongst other methods.
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fowler, Martin
Living people
1963 births
Alumni of University College London
British software engineers
British bloggers
British technology writers
Extreme programming
People from Walsall
People educated at Queen Mary's Grammar School
British expatriates in the United States
Agile software development