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The design space of multi-language development environments

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Abstract

Non-trivial software systems integrate many artifacts expressed in multiple modeling and programming languages. However, even though these artifacts heavily depend on each other, existing development environments do not sufficiently support handling relations between artifacts in different languages. By means of a literature survey, tool prototyping, and experiments, we study the design space of multi-language development environments (MLDEs)—tools that consider cross-language relations as first artifacts. We ask: What is the state of the art in the MLDE space? What are the design choices and challenges faced by tool builders? To what extent are MLDEs desired by users, and what aspects of MLDEs are particularly helpful? Our main conclusions are that (a) cross-language relations are ubiquitous and troublesome in multi-language systems, (b) users highly appreciate cross-language support mechanisms of MLDEs, and (c) generic MLDEs clearly advance the state of the art in tooling for language integration. The technical artifacts resulting from this study include a feature model of the MLDE design space, a data set of harvested cross-language relations in a case study system (JTrac) and two MLDE prototypes, TexMo and Coral, that implement two radically different choices in the design space.

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Notes

  1. http://ofbiz.org, see also [44] on use of DSLs in OFBiz.

  2. http://www.adempiere.com.

  3. http://www.magentocommerce.com.

  4. http://www.x-cart.com.

  5. http://wiki.eclipse.org/KM3.

  6. http://www.variabilitymodeling.org.

  7. http://www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/evl/.

  8. http://eclipse.org/atl.

  9. http://eclipse.org/acceleo.

  10. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xpand.

  11. http://help.eclipse.org/helios/topic/org.eclipse.xtext.doc/help/MWE2.html.

  12. http://www.jtrac.info/.

  13. http://wicket.apache.org/.

  14. We examined the following IDEs/editors: Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/, NetBeans http://netbeans.org/, IntelliJ Idea http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/, MonoDevelop http://monodevelop.com/, XCode https://developer.apple.com/xcode/, Ninja IDE http://ninja-ide.org/, MacVim http://macvim.org/, Emacs http://aquamacs.org/, TextWrangler http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/, TextMate http://macromates.com/, Sublime Text 2 http://www.sublimetext.com/, Fraise https://github.com/jfmoy/Fraise, Smultron http://sourceforge.net/projects/smultron/, Tincta http://mr-fridge.de/software/tincta/index.php, jEdit http://jedit.org/, Kod http://kodapp.com/, gedit http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/.

  15. Language workbenches use modeling technology to represent abstract syntax trees. Therefore, we use the terms AST and model synonymously in this paper, even though this narrows somewhat the traditional meaning of modeling.

  16. See www.languageworkbenches.net for the annual language workbench competition.

  17. www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/doors.

  18. http://www.itu.dk/~ropf/download/texmo.zip.

  19. The grammar rules for TexMo’s universal language representation can be found in the file TexMo.cs in the TexMo sources.

  20. http://www.itu.dk/~ropf/coral.html.

  21. http://www.eclipse.org/ajdt.

  22. http://www.springsource.org/sts.

  23. http://www.hibernate.org/subprojects/tools.html.

  24. http://code.google.com/p/qwickie.

  25. http://emftext.org.

  26. A modified version of http://www.emftext.org/index.php/EMFText_Concrete_Syntax_Zoo_Properties_Java.

  27. http://www.itu.dk/~ropf/coral.html#Constraints.

  28. http://www.itu.dk/~ropf/coral/tech_experiment.zip.

  29. http://sourceforge.net/projects/j-trac/files/jtrac/2.1.0.

  30. http://hibernate.org.

  31. http://www.itu.dk/people/ropf/survey.zip.

  32. www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=27.

  33. emftext-users@mail-st.inf.tu-dresden.de.

  34. antlr-interest@antlr.org.

  35. users@javacc.java.net.

  36. http://users.parboiled.org.

  37. pyparsing-users@lists.sourceforge.net.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Uwe Aßmann and the Software Development Group at TU Dresden for hosting the first author for an extensive period during this work. Uwe Aßmann suggested surveying the language developer community as part of this study. We also thank Jendrik Johannes, Sven Karol, Jan Reimann, Mirko Seifert, and Christian Wende, David Christiansen, Hannes Mehnert, Jan Polowinski, and Hendrik Pfeiffer for discussions and help with validating the experiments. We thank all those participating in our survey and in the previous experiment on CLS mechanisms. Last but not least, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the earlier version of this paper for their comments and suggestions.

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    Rolf-Helge Pfeiffer & Andrzej Wąsowski

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Correspondence to Rolf-Helge Pfeiffer.

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Communicated by Dr. Antonio Vallecillo and Dr. Juha-Pekka Tolvanen.

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Pfeiffer, RH., Wąsowski, A. The design space of multi-language development environments. Softw Syst Model 14, 383–411 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0376-y

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