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  • Article: Domain Specific Languages in Erlang

    Erlang is mostly known for reliability and for its concurrency and scalability concepts. But did you know that Erlang is a language well suited for writing DSLs? Dennis Byrne shows you how.

  • Article: Best Practices for Model-Driven Software Development

    Model-driven software development no longer belongs to the fringes of the industry but is being applied in more and more software projects with great success. In this article, experienced MDD practitioners pass on some best practices based on the experiences gathered over years of development.

  • Einstein: an Experimental 4GL for SOA

    SOA implementation typically requires usage of multiple technologies for implementing different SOA aspects. Such implementation is a daunting task, requiring, at a minimum, understanding different technologies, involved in typical SOA implementation. One of the possible solutions to this complexity is developing Domain Specific programming languages for SOA.

  • Object Lifecycle Explorer Released on AlphaWorks

    Object Lifecycles (a.k.a State Machines) have been for the most part ignored by developers, architects and business process practitioners alike. A group of researchers from IBM Zurich has just released an Object Lifecycle modeling tool that complements and link with executable Business Process models.

  • Presentation: Intentional Software

    Business users doing programming? Charles Simonyi and Henk Kolk presents how Intentional Software offers a radical new software approach that separates business knowledge from software engineering knowledge, which means that business experts can be more innovative and responsive to the changes in the domain.

  • Will Polyglotism and DSLs make Java the Last Big Language?

    Ola Bini argues that the world will not have a new big language again because developers will find value in choosing different languages depending on their problem domain. Similarly Martin Folwer says that programmers will choose a language for what it can do in the same way that they choose frameworks now. On the other hand Joe Winchester debates that you can only be master of one language.

  • WebDSL: Lessons Learned from Creating a DSL

    In this article, Eelco Visser summarizes his approach to design WebDSL, a domain-specific language for developing dynamic web applications with a rich data model with a target architecture based on JBoss's Seam. He discusses paradigms and challenges of Language Engineering while sharing some of the lessons he learned along the way.

  • Presentation: Business Natural Languages Development in Ruby

    In this presentation, Jay Fields introduces his concept of Business Natural Languages (BNL). BNLs are a type of Domain Specific Language, designed to be readable by any subject matter expert, which allows to create maintainable specifications and documentation. The example languages are implemented using Ruby.

  • A Fair Comparison of REST and WS-* using an Architectural Decision Framework: is the Debate Over?

    Olaf Zimmermann and his colleagues have developed a general Architectural Decision Framework. In this paper presented at WWW 2008, they demonstrate how this framework can be used to compare REST and WS-* an possibly end an almost decade long debate.

  • Making the Business Case for Software Factories

    In this article, the authors have tried to carefully quantify the benefits of using a Software Factory Methodology for automating repetitive developments in a large enterprise development project at Siemens.

  • MountainWest RubyConf 2008 Videos

    The videos from MountainWest RubyConf 2008 are all available for downloading from the Confreaks website. We selected a few videos and provide an overview and some entry points into the talks.

  • Article: Building Domain Specific Languages on the CLR

    Ayende Rahien describes how to build internal DSLs on the CLR. He compares different .NET languages as suitable host languages for DSLs and presents Boo as an ideal candidate due to its meta programming facilities, flexibility, and performance.

  • Text Template Transformation Toolkit in Visual Studio 2008

    Visual Studio 2008 includes a Text Template Transformation Toolkit as part of Domain-Specific Language Tools, and can be used to generate code based on a text template.

  • Insights: You don't need your DSL to be English-like

    There is a widespread opinion that a good DSL has to be English-like. Dave Thomas advocates against such approach asserting that DSL are not about getting as close as possible to natural languages and that having this as a guiding principle of DSL design can be rather detrimental. He also highlights what he believes is important in DSL design and provides some examples of successful DSL.

  • Presentation: Scala: Bringing Future Languages to the JVM

    In this presentation, Lex Spoon discusses the Scala programming language. Topics covered include the origin of Scala, the philosophy behind Scala, the Scala feature set, Object-Oriented and Functional programming in Scala, examples of Scala code, writing DSLs, how Scala is converted into Java, Scala performance, Abstract Data Types, unapply, actors and partial functions.

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