Domain-Specific Languages in Practice

A User Study on the Success Factors

Report (2009)
Department
Software Computer Technology (AS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology. All rights reserved. No part of this series may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the authors.
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

31-12-2009

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2009-013

ISSN:

1872-5392

Faculty

Applied Sciences

Department

Software Computer Technology

Abstract

Domain specific languages (DSLs) are languages in which the properties of a specific domain can be expressed. In this paper we present an empirical study on the use of a DSL in industry. This DSL encapsulates the details of services that communicate using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). From definitions of the data contracts between clients and servers, WCF/C# code for service plumbing is generated. We conducted a survey amongst developers that use this DSL while developing applications for customers. The DSL has been used in about 30 projects all around the world. We describe the known success factors of the use of DSLs, such as improved maintainability and ease of re-use, and assert how well this DSL scores on all of them. The analysis of the results of this case study also shows which conditions should be fulfilled in order to increase the chances of success in using a DSL in a real life case.