Domain-Specific Languages for Service-Oriented Architectures: An Explorative Study

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are an important software development approach for many Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). They promise to model the various SOA concerns in a suitable way for the various technical and non-technical stakeholders of a SOA. However, so far the research on SOA DSLs concentrates on novel technical contributions, and not much evidence or counter-evidence for the claims associated to SOA DSLs has been provided. In this paper, the authors present a qualitative, explorative study that provides an initial analysis of a number of such claims through a series of three prototyping experiments in which each experiment has developed, analyzed, and compared a set of DSLs for process-driven SOAs.