Guided Development With Multiple Domain-Specific Languages

The authors study the Apache Open For Business (OFBiz), an industrial-strength platform for enterprise applications. OFBiz is an example of a substantial project using model-driven development with multiple Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). They identify consistency management as one of its key challenges. To address this challenge, they present SmartEMF, which is an extension of the Eclipse Modeling Framework that provides support for representing, checking, and maintaining constraints in the context of multiple loosely-coupled DSLs. SmartEMF provides a simple form of user guidance by computing the valid set of editing operations that are available in a given context.