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When Frameworks Let You Down

Platform-Imposed Constraints on the Design and Evolution of Domain-Specific Languages

Danny M. Groenewegen, Zef Hemel, Lennart C. L. Kats, Eelco Visser. When Frameworks Let You Down. Platform-Imposed Constraints on the Design and Evolution of Domain-Specific Languages. In Jeff Gray et al, editors, Eighth OOPSLA Workshop on Domain Specific Modeling (DSM'08), pages 64—66. October 2008. [pdf] [bib

Abstract

Application frameworks encapsulate domain knowledge in a reusable library, providing abstractions for a particular domain. As such, they can form the basis for domain-specific languages, which may offer notational constructs, static analysis, and optimizations specific for the domain. Additional abstractions can be incrementally added on top of a domain-specific, following an inductive approach towards its design, evolving the language as new domain insights are acquired. A problem arises when such additions do not align well with the underlying framework. In this paper, we provide different examples of this problem and describe scenarios of dealing with it.


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