A Practical Experiment to Give Dynamic Semantics to a DSL for Telephony Services Development
Résumé
Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are high level languages defined for combining expressivity and simplicity by means of constructs which are close to the problem domain and distant from the intricacies of underlying software implementation constraints. In contrast with general purpose languages, DSLs are typically not useful for generic tasks in multiple application domains. The specification of a DSL is a complex task and requires a lot of knowledge about the domain. In the context of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) metamodeling based techniques are quite commonplace in the syntax specification of DSLs. The definition of their semantics still presents difficulties. In this paper, a practical experiment is proposed where Abstract State Machines (ASMs) are used as a formal ground for giving, in a precise and unambiguous way, the dynamic semantics of Session Programming Language (SPL), a DSL defined for the development of telephony services over the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). This experiment is performed in the context of a MDE framework called AMMA (Atlas Model Management Architecture). Although still under development, the approach proposed here illustrates a practical and generic solution to define the precise dynamic semantics of DSLs.