On designing safe and flexible embedded DSLs with Java 5

Abstract

a b s t r a c tAlthough embedded DSLs are widely used in both functional and dynamic languages they are yet to be widely accepted in the Java community. The best available examples are projects like jMock and Hibernate Criteria Query. In this paper we introduce the design of three novel practical embedded DSLs that we designed to showcase the power of Java language and specifically the changes introduced in Java 5. One of those DSLs is fully implemented as an open source project and is gathering momentum in the community. We proceed to discuss the approaches that allow designing safe and flexible DSLs by extracting generic patterns where possible and describing more specific idioms where necessary. It is our goal that this paper would serve as a starting point for someone designing an embedded DSL that takes full advantage of the Java 5 features.

Fluent Interfaces to a Java-based Internal Domain-Specific Languages for Graph Generation and Analysis

“…A fluent interface is one where syntactic features of the hosting language are used to good effect to construct an internal DSL that captures the jargon, the commands and other notions of the requisite application domain. We make use of modern Java [11] and language features such as for-each iteration [22] to implement a fluent interface for our graph and network computational framework. We are able to support graph algorithms [28] to compute component labelling [18]; path and loop identification and classification [16,26]; and generation [27,29] of a range of different synthetic graph data sets.…”