Demanding first-class equality for domain specific aspect languages

Abstract

Domain specific aspect languages (DSALs) are programming languages that are both domain specific and aspect-oriented. However, DSALs seem to be second-class. On the one hand, language workbenches handle only DSLs that are not aspect-oriented, making it difficult to develop new DSALs. On the other hand, development tools for general purpose aspect-oriented languages do not work with DSALs, making it difficult to use them. In this work we present an approach for building a modular DSAL workbench that produces first-class DSALs. A DSAL is said to be first-class if development tools treat it as a general purpose AOP language. Specifically, this means that first-class DSALs for Java can be used with tools that work with AspectJ. For concreteness, we illustrate the approach by describing our implementation of a DSAL workbench, comprising the Spoofax language workbench and the Awesome composition framework, for programming with first-class DSALs in Java.