A DSL paradigm for domains of services: A study of communication services

Abstract

The domain of services for mobile communication terminals has long become a fast-moving target. Indeed, this domain has been affected by a continuous stream of technological advances on aspects ranging from physical infrastructures to mobile terminals. As a result, services for this domain are known to be very unpredictable and volatile. This situation is even worse when considering services relying heavily on multimedia activities (e.g., games, audio and/or video messages, etc.). Such an application area is very sensitive to a large variety of aspects such as terminal capabilities (graphics, CPU, etc.), bandwidth, service provider’s billing policies, QoS, and user expectations. To address these issues, we present a paradigm based on domain-specific languages (DSLs) that enables networking and telecommunication experts to quickly develop robust communication services. Importantly, we propose implementation strategies to enable this paradigm to be supported by existing software infrastructures. Our DSL paradigm is uniformly used to develop a platform for communication services, named Nova. This platform addresses various domains of services including telephony services, e-mail processing, remotedocument processing, stream processing, and HTTP resource adaption.