Sirius Web: Insights in Language Workbenches – An Experience Report

By: Théo Giraudet, Mélanie Bats, Arnaud Blouin, Benoît Combemale, Pierre-Charles David

Abstract

Sirius Web is an open-source, web-based language workbench maintained by Obeo and hosted under the Eclipse Foundation. It is the successor of Sirius Desktop, an Eclipse-based language workbench used for producing numerous industrial graphical modeling workbenches in the past decades. Leveraging this valuable experience, this article provides an overview of Sirius Web and documents the rationales and good practices that have shaped its development. Specifically, it focuses on the rationales behind modeling and usability features, their impact on the development lifecycle of tool-supported modeling languages, and the software architecture of the language workbench and the resulting modeling environments. Concrete examples illustrate both the detailed rationales and the use of the tool. The article also discusses alternative approaches Obeo considered and identifies open questions for the software language engineering community. By addressing current open questions, this study contributes to the ongoing dialogue in the community and potentially steers future research directions.

Keywords

Language Workbench, Language Engineering, Domain-Specific Language, Low Code

Cite as:

Théo Giraudet, Mélanie Bats, Arnaud Blouin, Benoît Combemale, Pierre-Charles David, “Sirius Web: Insights in Language Workbenches – An Experience Report”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 23, no. 1 ( 2024), pp. 1-20, doi:10.5381/jot.2024.23.1.a6.