Section: New Results

Domain-Specific languages

In the field of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), we have focused on the improvement of the DSLs definition process. During 2012 the new results in this area have been:

• Software development processes are becoming more collaborative, trying to integrate end-users as much as possible. The idea is to advance towards a community-driven process where all actors (both technical and nontechnical) work together to ensure that the system-to-be will satisfy all expectations. This seems specially appropriate in the field of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) typically designed to facilitate the development of software for a particular domain. We have designed a collaborative infrastructure for the development of DSLs where end-users have a direct and active participation in the evolution of the language [22] , [32] . This infrastructure is based on Collaboro, a DSL to represent change proposals, possible solutions and comments arisen during the development and evolution of a language.

• When developing DSLs, a number of design decisions must be made, such as those related to its concrete syntax, how the language semantics is going to be defined and in which form (interpreted or compiled), or whether there will be an underlying abstract syntax. However, deciding whether the DSL will be internal or external will have an impact on the other aspects of the language. Making an effective choice between these two options therefore requires a careful evaluation of the pros and cons of each alternative. Some important aspects that should be evaluated are the following, which are related to the three elements of a DSL: abstract and concrete syntaxes, and semantics (executability and optimizations), and to quality criteria (extensibility and efficiency) and DSL tooling (tools for developing DSL and tools for using DSL). In [40] we presented the results of this work.