Domain-Specific Modeling Languages to improve framework instantiation

• We use Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) to facilitate framework reuse.
• We propose an approach to identify the features and to build DSMLs of frameworks.
• Our approach is tool-independent and it can be applied for any type of framework.
• The building and the use of the DSMLs of two frameworks are presented as examples.
• We attested that DSMLs also reduce errors in framework instantiation, besides time.

Frameworks are reusable software composed of concrete and abstract classes that implement the functionality of a domain. Applications reuse frameworks to enhance quality and development efficiency. However, frameworks are hard to learn and reuse. Application developers must understand the complex class hierarchy of the framework to instantiate it properly. In this paper, we present an approach to build a Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) of a framework and use it to facilitate framework reuse during application development. The DSML of a framework is built by identifying the features of this framework and the information required to instantiate them. Application generators transform models created with the DSML into application code, hiding framework complexities. In this paper, we illustrate the use of our approach in a framework for the domain of business resource transactions and a experiment that evaluated the efficiency obtained with our approach.