A comparison of standard compliant ways to define domain specific languages

Abstract

Domain specific languages are of increasing importance for today's software development processes. Their area of application ranges from process modeling over architecture description and system design to behavioral specification and simulation. There are numerous approaches for the definition and implementation of DSLs. Among others, the OMG offers UML profiles as a lightweight extension of a predefined multi-purpose language and MOF as a metamodeling language, which can be used to define DSLs from scratch. This contribution investigates various approaches to define DSLs, focusing on architectural description languages as an example. Besides the usage of UML profiles and the definition of an entirely new language with MOF, the adaption of the UML based on a metamodel extension is also considered. As a consequence of the shortcomings depicted for the different approaches, we suggest to combine UML profiles and metamodeling in order to compensate their weaknesses and take advantage of their benefits. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.