Efficient Editor Generation for Compositional DSLs in Eclipse
This work addresses the need for efficient editor development in DSL projects, particularly for teams using Eclipse, but it appears incremental as it builds on the existing MontiCore framework.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently generating editors for domain-specific languages (DSLs) that integrate well into development environments like Eclipse, by presenting an extension to the MontiCore framework that enables such generation and supports compositional reuse.
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.