Efficient Editor Generation for Compositional DSLs in Eclipse

TL;DR

This paper presents a method within the MontiCore framework for efficiently generating Eclipse editors for compositional domain-specific languages, facilitating easier development and evolution of DSLs.

Contribution

It introduces an extension to MontiCore that enables rapid, reusable generation of Eclipse editors for compositional DSLs, improving development efficiency.

Findings

Supports reuse of existing language and editor definitions

Enables efficient development and evolution of DSL editors

Facilitates integration of DSLs into Eclipse environment

Abstract

When a domain specific language (DSL) shall be commonly used, it is important for the development team to have a comfortable editor well integrated in the project's development environment. As DSL are rather often subject to changes, efficient development and evolvement of a comfortable editor is an important success criterion for the acceptance of domain specific languages. In this paper we demonstrate how this issue is addressed in the MontiCore DSL development framework. Basically an extension of the MontiCore DSL definition language can be used to efficiently generate DSL editors for Eclipse. The generation tool also supports the compositional language definition features of MontiCore and allows therefore the reuse of existing language and editor definitions.