A Case Study in DSL Re-targetability

Domain-specific language is a computer programming language of limited expressiveness focused on a particular domain. By focusing on domain concepts, there is a little need to care about non-essential details during software development process. One non-essential aspect that developers are mostly willing to dispose of is a target platform on which the application is to be executed. Ideally, the task of porting a software system to different platforms should be completely hidden from the developer’s point of view. Consequently, the DSL compiler is responsible for generating codes in different target languages that are compatible with different platforms. This problem is known as DSL re-targetability. The goal of this thesis is to explore DSL re-targetability challenges to find out how the characteristics of a DSL associated with the target platform can determine the degree of portability. To achieve this goal, mobl (a DSL for mobile web applications) has been chosen as a source DSL. As a new target platform for mobl, iOS native applications especially for iPad have been selected. Afterwards, a compiler to transform mobl to Objective-C (which is Apple recommended programming language to develop iOS applications) has been designed and implemented. Now, a great number of applications written in mobl for web backend can be compiled to Objective-C backend with minimal changes in their source code. The resulting iOS applications meet the iPad applications standards suggested by Apple. However, to have real iPad style applications, some adjustments in the source code are recommended.

Subject

DSL
Re-targetability
mobl

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master thesis

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