Mining of DSLs and generator templates from reference applications
Wolf Rost · 2020
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) found application in different domains. The development of Model-Driven Development (MDD) components is facilitated by a wealth of frameworks like EMF, Xtext, and Xtend. However, the development of the necessary IDE components still can take up to several weeks or even months until it can be used in a production environment. The first step during the development of such an MDD infrastructure is to analyse a set of reference applications to deduce the DSL used by the domain experts and the templates used in the generator. The analysis requires technical expertise and is usually performed by MDD infrastructure developers, who have to adhere to a close communication with domain experts and are exposed to high cognitive load and time-consuming tasks.