Section: Software

Community-driven language development

URL: http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/collaboro/

Software development processes are collaborative in nature. Neglecting the key role of end-users leads to software that does not satisfy their needs. This collaboration becomes specially important when creating Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), which are (modeling) languages specifically designed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are actually the experts of the domain for which a DSL is developed, their participation in the DSL specification process is still rather limited nowadays.

Thus, Collaboro is an approach to make language development processes more participative, meaning that both developers and users of the language can collaborate together to create and evolve it. The tool has been developed as an Eclipse plugin, whose features currently implemented are:

• Version view to navigate through the Proposals of a version. For each Proposal, the solutions and comments are shown.

• Collaboration view to show the data related to a Collaboration selected in the version view. This view also shows the changes to apply if the selected element is a Solution.

• The user can login to the Collaboro system and create proposals, solutions and comments by right-clicking in the version view. The user can also vote for/against the collaborations.

• Decision engine based on a total agreement (i.e., all the community users must vote for the collaboration). The decision engine can be launch by using the bar menu.

• Notation engine and Notation view to render SVG snapshots of the DSL concrete syntax.