Domain-Specific Languages for IoT: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a multidisciplinary tool used by field experts to fabricate technology into their discipline; these fields experts thus need access to a simple, understandable and user-friendly programming language for this purpose. Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) have been developed to pave the way for such domain experts to integrate IoT capabilities into their everyday tasks. IoT is thus one of the main technologies targeting human day-to-day activities, and the concept of IoT has caused a general rethink and reimagining of the shape of life in the future. Many researchers are thus working on fields related to IoT such as networking, power consumption, data aggregation and fusion, finding ways to offer this new technology for end user access in a smooth and easy manner. Introducing new application development methods and using software engineering standards and tools that enable end-users to develop their own IoT applications is another aspect that has received attention in the last decade; however, this aspect requires more work from the research community. The main contribution of this paper is to highlight current efforts related to the IoT field and to perform quantitative analysis to highlight the current state of the art in both positive and negative terms, including the current limitations and obstacles faced by both end-users and field experts seeking to build their own IoT applications.