A Study on Variability for Multi-Device Rendering in Digital Music Publishing

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) offer expressive support for particular problem domains and promise substantial gains compared to general-purpose languages (GPLs). Variability management techniques have been successfully and widely applied in software development for GPLs. This paper describes an exploratory study on using variability management in the context of DSLs for digital publishing. Specifically, the paper presents a digital publishing workflow complementing a music engraving DSL to automatically create musical scores for diverse mobile devices. The paper illustrates variability challenges and shows how the approach links different variability mechanisms in a fully-automated workflow. The evaluation based on an archive of 141 digital music artifacts shows that 98,3% of all pages were correctly rendered. Further, the performance results show a strong correlation of the input size with the engraving time regardless of the kind of device. The paper discusses lessons learned and outlines opportunities for further research.