11,805 research outputs found
Metamorphic Domain-Specific Languages: A Journey Into the Shapes of a Language
External or internal domain-specific languages (DSLs) or (fluent) APIs?
Whoever you are -- a developer or a user of a DSL -- you usually have to choose
your side; you should not! What about metamorphic DSLs that change their shape
according to your needs? We report on our 4-years journey of providing the
"right" support (in the domain of feature modeling), leading us to develop an
external DSL, different shapes of an internal API, and maintain all these
languages. A key insight is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution or no
clear superiority of a solution compared to another. On the contrary, we found
that it does make sense to continue the maintenance of an external and internal
DSL. The vision that we foresee for the future of software languages is their
ability to be self-adaptable to the most appropriate shape (including the
corresponding integrated development environment) according to a particular
usage or task. We call metamorphic DSL such a language, able to change from one
shape to another shape
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The P3 platform: an approach and software system for developing diagrammatic model-based methods in design research
Many issues in design and design management have been explored by building models which capture the relationships between different aspects of the problem at hand. These models require computer support to construct and analyse. However, appropriate modelling tools can be time-consuming to develop in a research environment. Reflecting upon five design research projects, this paper proposes that such projects can be facilitated by recognising the iterative and tightly-coupled nature of research and tool development, and by attempting to minimise the effort of solution prototyping within this process. Our approach is enabled by a software platform which can be rapidly configured to implement many conceivable modelling approaches. This configurability is complemented by an emerging library of modelling and analysis approaches tailored to explore design process systems. The platform-based approach enables any mix of modelling concepts to be easily created. We propose it could thus help researchers to explore a wide range of questions without being constrained to existing conventions for modelling – or for model integration
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