Section: Scientific Foundations

Domain-Specific Languages

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) represent domain knowledge in terms of suitable basic language constructs and their compositions at the language level. By trading generality for abstraction, they enable complex relationships among domain concepts to be expressed concisely and their properties to be expressed and formally analyzed. DSLs have been applied to a large number of domains; they have been particularly popular in the domain of software generation and maintenance  [70] , [85] .

Many modularization techniques and tasks can be naturally expressed by DSLs that are either specialized with respect to the type of modularization constructs, such as a specific brand of software component, or to the compositions that are admissible in the context of an application domain that is targeted by a modular implementation. Moreover, software development and evolution processes can frequently be expressed by transformations between applications implemented using different DSLs that represent an implementation at different abstraction levels or different parts of one application.

Functionalities that crosscut a component-based application, however, complicate such a DSL-based transformational software development process. Since such functionalities belong to another domain than that captured by the components, different DSLs should be composed. Such compositions (including their syntactic expression, semantics and property analysis) have only very partially been explored until now. Furthermore, restricted composition languages and many aspect languages that only match execution events of a specific domain (e.g., specific file accesses in the case of security functionality) and trigger only domain-specific actions clearly are quite similar to DSLs but remain to be explored.