An important challenge in software development is to have efficient tools for creating, debugging, and testing software components developed for specific business domains. This is more imperative if it is considered that a large number of users are not familiar with popular programming languages. Hence, Application Creation Environments (ACEs) based on specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) can provide an efficient way for creating applications for a specific domain of interest. The provided ACEs should incorporate all the functionality needed by developers to build, debug, and test applications. In this chapter, the authors present their contribution in this domain based on the experience of the IPAC system. The IPAC system provides a middleware and an ACE for developing and using intelligent, context-aware services in mobile nodes. The chapter fully describes the ACE, which is a key part of the overall architecture. The ACE provides two editors (textual, visual), a wide functionality spectrum, as well as a debugger and an application emulator. The ACE is based on an Application Description Language (ADL) developed for IPAC. The ADL provides elements for the description of an application workflow for embedded systems. Through such functionality, developers are capable of efficiently creating and testing applications that will be deployed on mobile nodes.
Defining DSL design principles for enhancing the requirements elicitation process
