A transformational approach to generating application-specific environments

Abstract

Current software development environments tend to lie at opposite ends of a spectrum: at one extreme are specialized application generators; at the other are general-purpose programming environments. The former provide strong support for system development and reuse, but are costly to build and available only for limited domains. The latter provide weak support, but are generally available and universally applicable. We describe a technique for automating the production of application-specific environments that lie between these two extremes. The key idea is that these environments can be derived from general-purpose programming environments by a process of structured transformation. We describe a tool for performing these transformations. It provides a set of formal operators for specializing a description of a general-purpose environment; as operators are applied, the system semi-automatically builds a set of transformation rules used to translate application-specific programs into those of the original general-purpose environment. The output of the tool is an application-specific environment together with a program transformer that provides execution semantics for programs written in that environment.