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

Abstracting modelling languages: A reutilization approach

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31095-9_9Proceedings of 24th International Conference, CAiSE 2012, Gdansk, Poland, June 25-29, 2012Model-Driven Engineering automates the development of information systems. This approach is based on the use of Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs) for the description of the relevant aspects of the systems to be built. The increasing complexity of the target systems has raised the need for abstraction techniques able to produce simpler versions of the models, but retaining certain properties of interest. However, developing such abstractions for each DSML from scratch is a time and resource consuming activity. Our solution to this situation is a number of techniques to build reusable abstractions that are defined once and can be reused over families of modelling languages sharing certain requirements. As a proof of concept, we present a catalogue of reusable abstractions, together with an implementation in the MetaDepth multi-level meta-modelling tool.Work funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (TIN2011-24139), and the R&D programme of Madrid Region (S2009/TIC-1650)