Component-based DSL Development

Abstract

Domain specific languages (DSLs) have proven to be a very adequate mechanism to encapsulate and hide the complex implementation details of component-based software development. Since evolution lies at the heart of any software system the DSLs that were built around them must evolve as well. In this paper we identify important issues that cause a DSL implementation to be very rigid in which all phases are tightly coupled and highly dependent upon one another. To increase the poor evolvability of current day DSL development environments a new development environment Keyword based programming (KBP) is proposed where DSLs are built by using a language specification to compose and glue loosely coupled and independent language components (called keywords)