skip to main content
10.1145/1370847.1370859acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Software design using UML for empowering end-users with an external domain specific language

Published: 12 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Domain Specific Languages (DSL) also known as "small languages" lack the power of a general purpose language (GPL), but are very productive for the purpose they are designed. While "internal" DSLs require and rely on the use of a hosting GPL, "external" DSLs are independent of a GPL and are thus more suitable for the non-programmer - but domain expert - end-user. Empowering this end-user via DSLs is our prime goal as software designers and architects. Our product will be stronger since much of the final tuning of the application can be done by the end-user and will reduce the number of software revisions that require stringent GPL software testing and validations.
As software engineers, the design of a DSL as part of our product should fit into the tools of the trade of software development. We adopt UML for this purpose and propose that the design of DSL can be embedded as an extension of the traditional software modeling and design tools. In this paper we present firstly a view of software development process in which DSLs are an integral part, and than how we use UML to design a DSL which, via empowering a domain expert end-user, achieves challenging software delivery requirements with good stability and excellent performance.

References

[1]
Domain-Specific Languages: An Annotated Bibliography, Arie van Deursen, Paul Klint, Joost Visser, http://homepages.cwi.nl/~arie/papers/dslbib/. Accessed on August 16, 2006.
[2]
Martin Fowler, "Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?" http://martinfowler.com/articles/languageWorkbench.html, Viewed on Jan 26, 2008.
[3]
Unified Modeling Language Version 2.0 Specifications, Object Management Group, http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/uml.htm. Accessed on August 16, 2006.
[4]
The Eclipse Modeling Framework, http://www.eclipse.org/emf/emf.php. Accessed on August 16, 2006.
[5]
Eclipse Modeling Framework: a Developer's Guide, by Frank Budinsky et. al., Addison-Wesley, 2003, ISBN 0-13-142542-0.
[6]
Object Management Group (OMG) Unified Modeling Language (UML) Resource Page, http://www.uml.org. Viewed Feb 15, 2008.
[7]
Java" 2 Platform Enterprise Edition Specification, v1.4, Sun Microsystems®, Nov 2003, http://java.sun.com/j2ee/j2ee-1_4-fr-spec.pdf.
[8]
WebSphere Application Server V6 Scalability and Performance Handbook, IBM Redbook, SG24-6392-00, ISBN: 0738490601
[9]
The Eclipse project organization http://www.eclipse.org. Accessed on August 16, 2006.

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
WEUSE '08: Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on End-user software engineering
May 2008
102 pages
ISBN:9781605580340
DOI:10.1145/1370847
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 May 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. domain specific languages
  2. eclipse
  3. emf
  4. ide
  5. software development

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

ICSE '08
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

WEUSE '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 20 of 21 submissions, 95%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 20 of 21 submissions, 95%

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 329
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)4
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media