Information: YAKINDU Statechart Tools Is Now itemis CREATE
Many people influenced our work over the past years, among them masterminds like Martin Fowler, Ken Schwaber, Tom DeMarco, to name just a few.
However, the work of one computer science professor from Israel was particularly important to us – the work of David Harel.
Development of UML Statecharts
David Harel did his PhD in 1978 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He then became a Professor for Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem in 1980.
He developed the graphical representation of finite state machines in the 1980s, allowing for the first time a precise specification of state-based systems.
He simultaneously introduced new notation elements to handle the complexity of large systems. His statecharts eventually became an element of the Unified Modeling Language and it’s hard to imagine today’s software development without it.
I-Logix Inc., STATEMATE and Rhapsody
In 1984 Harel founded AdCad Ltd., which later transitioned into I-Logix Inc. The company’s aim was to develop an environment for designing complex reactive systems based on the theory of statecharts. This environment was published under the name STATEMATE and is especially suitable for the development for embedded systems.
A couple of years later I-Logix developed Rhapsody, which in contrast to STATEMATE is object-oriented and used for the development of enterprise applications.
Both products were so successful that I-Logix was bought by the Swedish company Telelogic AB in 2006. Only one year later Telelogic was bought by IBM and so Rhapsody was integrated into IBM’s software brand Rational.
So much about David and his ventures but what does it all have to do with us? Read on!
The development of YAKINDU Statechart Tools
“The year is 50 B.C. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders…”
Maybe this wasn’t exactly the way the development of YAKINDU Statechart Tools started eight years ago. However, a troop of indomitable software developers, lead by their chiefs Axel Terfloth and Andreas Mülder, came up with the idea of doing something even better with statecharts than STATEMATE and Rhapsody already did.
And so little by little YAKINDU Statechart Tools was developed. What started as an open source project soon became a bigger idea that we wanted to develop into a product that we can bring to market. On December 16, 2016 it finally happened: Version 1.0 of our enterprise application was introduced to the world.
What would David Harel say about it?
We dared to ask him and were happily surprised to get a quick answer:
"I like the YAKINDU Statechart Tool a lot, especially the fact that it is simple and direct, and is not burdened with some of the more advanced, expensive and heavy features of other professional Statechart tools."
Whoa! Go figure!
We are proud as Punch! If the very founder of statecharts is convinced by our tool we’re confident it will be successfull on the market as well.
Thank you very much, David!
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