Language-Driven Engineering An Interdisciplinary Software Development Paradigm
Bernhard Steffen, Tiziana Margaria, Alexander Bainczyk, Steve Boßelmann, Daniel Busch, Marc Driessen, Markus Frohme, Falk Howar, Sven Jörges, Marvin Krause, Marco Krumrey, Anna-Lena Lamprecht, Michael Lybecait, Alnis Murtovi, Stefan Naujokat, Johannes Neubauer, Alexander Schieweck, Jonas Schürmann, Steven Smyth, Barbara Steffen, Fabian Storek, Tim Tegeler, Sebastian Teumert, Dominic Wirkner, Philip Zweihoff
TL;DR
Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) replaces single-language software development with a family of domain-specific graphical modeling languages (PSLs) generated by Cin-co to produce end-to-end software artifacts. The approach is demonstrated through seven IMEs and four DIME-generated web applications, with deployment pipelines orchestrated by Rig, and exemplified by Equinocs; the One Thing approach coordinates multiple stakeholders via a single source of truth and automated generation. The contributions include a detailed description of the LDE stack (Cin-co, Dime, Pyrus, IPSUM, Rig) and a set of fully automated deployments within an open-source ecosystem, aimed at reducing cross-disciplinary friction and accelerating large-scale system development. The work shows that cross-domain collaboration and full code generation are practical at scale, enabling domain experts to contribute directly to software creation and deployment.
Abstract
We illustrate how purpose-specific, graphical modeling enables application experts with different levels of expertise to collaboratively design and then produce complex applications using their individual, purpose-specific modeling language. Our illustration includes seven graphical Integrated Modeling Environments (IMEs) that support full code generation, as well as four browser-based applications that were modeled and then fully automatically generated and produced using DIME, our most complex graphical IME. While the seven IMEs were chosen to illustrate the types of languages we support with our Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) approach, the four DIME products were chosen to give an impression of the power of our LDE-generated IMEs. In fact, Equinocs, Springer Nature's future editorial system for proceedings, is also being fully automatically generated and then deployed at their Dordrecht site using a deployment pipeline generated with Rig, one of the IMEs presented. Our technology is open source and the products presented are currently in use.