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Reuseware - Adding Modularity to Your Language of Choice

Jakob Henriksson, Jendrik Johannes, Steffen Zschaler and Uwe Assmann
Fakultät für Informatik, Technische Universität Dresden

 

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Abstract

The trend towards domain-specific languages leads to an ever-growing plethora of highly specialized languages. Developers of such languages focus on their specific domains rather than on technical challenges of language design. Generic features of languages are rarely included in special-purpose languages. One very important feature is modularization, the ability to formulate partial programs in separate entities, composable into a complete program in a defined manner. This paper presents a generic approach for adding modularity to arbitrary languages, discussing the underlying concepts and presenting the Reuseware Composition Framework. We walk through an example based on Xcerpt, a Semantic Web query language.


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About the authors



  Jakob Henriksson obtained his MSc. from Linköpings universitet, Sweden, in October 2004. Since July 2005 he is working as research assistant in the Software Technology Group at Technische Universität Dresden. His research interests are in the Semantic Web, software composition and hybrid reasoning. E-mail: jakob.henriksson@tudresden.de.


  Jendrik Johannes obtained his Dipl.-Medieninf. from Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, in November 2006. Since December 2006 he is working as research assistant in the Software Technology Group at Technische Universität Dresden. He developed the first version of the Reuseware Composition Framework. His research interests are in software, language and (meta)model composition. E-mail: jendrik.johannes@mailbox.tu-dresden.de.


  Steffen Zschaler obtained his Dipl.-Inf. from Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, in 2002 and his doctorate in 2007. Currently he is working as a research assistant in the Software Technology Group at Technische Universität Dresden. His research focuses on formal models of non-functional properties of component-based software, and on language and model composition. E-mail: Steffen.Zschaler@tudresden.de.


 

Uwe Assmann is professor for software engineering at Technische Universität Dresden. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Universität Karlsruhe in 1995, showing how to generate program optimizers from graph rewrite systems. In the last years, he has developed an invasive software composition system, COMPOST, for grey-box component composition. E-mail: uwe.assmann@tu-dresden.de.


Cite this column as follows: Jakob Henriksson, Jendrik Johannes, Steffen Zschaler and Uwe Assmann: "Reuseware - Adding Modularity to Your Language of Choice", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 6, no. 9, Special Issue. TOOLS EUROPE 2007, October 2007, pp. 127-146 http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2007_10/paper7/


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