Abstract
Several advantages have been documented that suggest Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) have the potential to improve productivity, reliability, maintainability and portability in some specialized domains. However, several key challenges still remain. In particular, the extension and evolution of both DSL syntax and semantics still suffer due to the limitations related to the current state-of-the-art implementation techniques. Such techniques also lack interoperable capabilities among base languages and limited tool support. As changes of domain concepts are omnipresent and more base languages may support DSL implementation, the aforementioned limitations may be no longer tolerable, and hence a new implementation technique to DSL development is desired. This paper implements six DSL case studies (representing imperative, declarative and hybrid categories) to validate the feasibility of utilizing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for DSL implementation. Such case studies also highlight that the advantages of SOA (i.e., ease of evolution/extension, interoperability and tool support) can be retained under the context of DSL development. The paper concludes with the discussion of additional findings, both positive and negative: the SOA-based approach improves modularization at the lexical, syntactical and semantic levels and delegates tokenization/parsing to the underlying WS-BPEL engine; yet, the usability, resource utilization, security, and flexibility of the SOA-based DSLs are degraded, which requires more future work in this unique area that spans SOA and DSLs.