TOWARD EASING THE INSTANTIATION OF APPLICATIONS USING GRENJ FRAMEWORK BY MEANS OF A DOMAIN SPECIFIC LANGUAGE

Abstract

White-box frameworks are a collection of extensible classes representing reusable designs that can be extended, to varying degrees, to instantiate custom-tailored software systems. Due to its inherent benefits (e.g., large-scale reuse of code, design, and domain knowledge), such domain-specific reuse approach has become a de facto standard to implement business systems. However, in order to fully realize the advantages of white-box frameworks, developers need to have substantial architectural and technical knowledge. In effect, developers must be familiar with the framework's extension points (e.g., hot spots) and how to program those extensions using the programming language in which the framework was implemented. GRENJ is a white-box framework implemented in Java. Thus, instantiating applications through such framework is quite complex and demands detailed architectural knowledge and advanced Java programming skills. In order to lessen the amount of source code, effort, and expertise required to instantiate applications by using GRENJ framework, we have developed a domain specific language that manages all application instantiation issues systematically. This domain specific language facilitates the application instantiation process by acting as a facade over GRENJ framework as well as providing the user with a more concise, human-readable syntax than Java. In this paper, we contrast the major differences and benefits resulting from instantiating applications solely using GRENJ framework and indirectly reusing its source code by applying our domain specific language.