Domain Engineering for Software Tools

General purpose software engineering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and often difficult to learn and use. Domain-specific tools tend to be small, focussed and easier to learn; however, domain-specific tooling tends to be technology specific and therefore introduces interoperability problems. This chapter provides a contribution to DSL tool development by describing a language-driven approach to domain engineering whereby a tool is modelled in terms of the syntax and semantics of the language it supports. This chapter uses UML to define a simple class modelling language and its tooling.