Section: Software and Platforms

Community-driven language development

URL: http://code.google.com/a/eclipselabs.org/p/collaboro/

Software development processes are collaborative in nature. Neglecting the key role of end-users leads to software that does not satisfy their needs. This collaboration becomes specially important when creating Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), which are (modeling) languages specifically designed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are actually the experts of the domain for which a DSL is developed, their participation in the DSL specification process is still rather limited nowadays.

Thus, Collaboro is an approach to make language development processes more participative, meaning that both developers and users of the language can collaborate together to design it and make it evolve. The tool has been developed as an Eclipse plugin, with currently the following features implemented:

• Version view to navigate through the Proposals of a version of a language. For each Proposal, the solutions and comments are shown.

• Collaboration view to show the data related to a Collaboration selected in the version view. This view also shows the changes to apply if the selected element is a Solution.

• The user can login to the Collaboro system and create proposals, solutions and comments by right-clicking in the version view. The user can also vote for/against the collaborations.

• Decision engine based on a total agreement (i.e., all the community users must vote for the collaboration). The decision engine can be launch by using the menu bar.

• Notation engine and Notation view to render SVG snapshots of the DSL concrete syntax.

• Support for example-driven development of DSMLs, thus incoporating a graphical editor which allows end-users to draw examples of the DSML they are developing.