Software development may suffer from considerable accidental complexity caused by the adopted technology. DSLs are a form of reducing such a complexity, moving the focus to the essential complexity of software. DSLs may also facilitate non-programmers to take part in the development of systems.

My PhD thesis addressed the development of APIs for Object-Oriented Frameworks that allow instantiation code to closely resemble domain concepts, and in turn, facilitate the definition of a DSL for developing applications based on a given framework.

Click on to see related publications; to visit the repository on Github.

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OO Framework + Specialization Layer

A technique to enrich a framework with a layer of specialization aspects – entities that form a uniform interface for fine-grained instantiation. This layer models the concepts of an application based on the framework, and hence, it embodies the abstract syntax of a modeling language for the framework domain. I’ve proposed Aspect-Oriented Programming for implementing the specialization layer, demonstrating how to achieve it for Java frameworks with AspectJ.

The ALFAMA workbench is a prototype that automatizes the definition of the abstract syntax of a modeling language in EMF from the specialization layer.

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Jedi

Java language extensions (via annotations) for design pattern instantiation, built as Lombok plugins.

This work was developed in the MSc thesis of Duarte Coelho.

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XDiagram

A technical DSL to define graphical DSLs in the ecosystem of Eclipse (EMF).