Building User-Friendly Dsls

Domain-specific languages are custom text or graphical interfaces that allow domain experts to create and modify their own software systems. With a syntax that's clear and familiar to the non-technical user, DSLs are precise enough to generate working software that would normally require traditional coding. Written for developers who need to create user-facing DSLs, Building User-Friendly DSLs unlocks clear and practical methods to create DSLs with easy-to-use interfaces. By working through a detailed example of a car rental company, you'll see how creating a custom DSL can get rid of time-consuming and bureaucratic code adjustments, freeing you up to work on features whilst your clients and colleagues write their software themselves!

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the technology

Imagine if your non-technical clients could safely produce software without the need for anyone to manually write code. Domain-specific languages are purpose-built programming interfaces that make that possible--no programming experience required. This frees software developers from the time-consuming translation of a client's functional and domain-specific specifications, replacing complex code for modern and intuitive UIs.

About the book

Building User-Friendly DSLs shows you how to design and build modern DSLs for business users. Drawing on years of industry experience, author Meinte Boersma lays out an iterative process for creating languages accessible to domain experts such as operations specialists, data analysts, and financial experts. You'll start with an overview of software language engineering before diving into the unique projectional editing paradigm that makes it easy to produce DSLs for business. There are no special tools or proprietary software required--you'll work with an open source JavaScript stack that ensures the techniques you learn are easy to port between projects.

What's inside

• Build a complete Domain IDE for a car rental company
• Implement a projectional editor for your DSL
• Implement content assist, type system, expressions, and versioning language aspects
• Evaluate business rules
• Work with Abstract Syntax Trees
• Reduce notated DSL content in concrete syntax into abstract syntax

Meinte Boersma has been a practitioner of model-driven software development and software language engineering since 2007. He has given workshops on DSL, participated in organizing the Language Workbench Challenge, and has spoken at conferences on DSLs.