Business DSLs in Web Applications
6Business domain-specific languages (DSLs) enable domain experts without programming knowledge to capture knowledge about business rules, workflows, calculations or data. These experts are typically not familiar with software development, and would consequently be scared off rather than supported by a complex IDE. On the other hand, good tooling is essential for the acceptance and usability of a DSLs.
In this talk, we show how to integrate powerful DSL editors in web applications with Xtext, such that they can be used in a web browser. This involves several technologies, including Ace or Orion as JavaScript libraries for text editing and Xtext as Java-based back-end for language-specific micro services such as validation, content assist, or code coloring. We discuss use cases, give general advice on language design, demonstrate examples, and show how you can leverage this approach in your own applications.
Jan Koehnlein, Holger Schill