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  • Is a picture always worth a thousand words?

    <p>Is a picture always worth a thousand words?</p> <p>In his recent article, &#8220;Why we write code and don&#8217;t just draw diagrams&#8221;, Dean Wampler argues that in software development the opposite is more often true. </p>

  • Should you be using RELAX-NG?

    10 reasons to consider using RELAX-NG in place of W3C XML Schemas as your XML schema language.

  • Interview: Jay Fields and Zak Tamsen on Domain Specific Languages

    Jay Fields and Zak Tamsen talked with InfoQ about Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), and how they have successfully used them in their projects at ThoughtWorks to empower businesses, reduce development time, and increase the agility of projects.

  • High abstraction level of DSLs to reduce the testing burden?

    Inconsistencies between the user interface and user’s expectations can be an important source of bugs. According to Leonardo Vernazza, this is due the fact that the user and the UI do not talk the same language. Using a DSL, characterized by a high abstraction level, would be instrumental for avoiding the risk of translation errors and would therefore reduce the testing burden.

  • Moving away from exclusive use of OOP and Curly Brace Languages to reduce code waste?

    According to Bob Warfield, at least 70% of code is wasted because it’s written to build components which would add no competitive differentiation to the final product. To reduce this "waste", programmers should practice code reuse instead of repeatedly building the same components. However, to facilitate code reuse it is necessary to move away from exclusive use of OOP and Curly Brace Languages.

  • Java, Ruby, and the Continuous Tax

    Recently as part of a debate on ActiveRecord and Hibernate, Bob Lee of Google used the term "continuous tax" to describe the pros and cons of using a dynamically typed language like Ruby in respect to a statically typed language such as Java.

  • Charles Simonyi reveals production use of Intentional Software @ JAOO

    Charles Simonyi (recent space tourist, and ex-Microsoft lead architect of Word & Excel) presented Intentional Software at the JAOO conference today. Intentional is building a domain language workbench, which allows business experts write domain code in their own familiar notations, that code then being used to generate the rest of an application.

  • Language-oriented programming : an evolutionary step beyond object-oriented programming?

    At a recent conference, Martin Fowler and Neal Ford develop the concept of language-oriented programming and question the eventuality for Domain Specific Languages to become a new abstraction and modelling mechanism. This could be "the next evolutionary step beyond object-oriented programming", especially since major vendors start offering IDE tooling for DSLs.

  • Amazon FPS: customized payment service & DSL

    Amazon released a beta of its new Amazon Flexible Payment Service – Amazon FPS. FPS lowers transaction costs and supports micro payments. An unlimited number of Payment Instructions can be defined using a DSL. FPS makes it possible and easy to build customized payment management services, which, according to Amazon, will ultimately result in creation of innovative business models.

  • DSLs bringing the end of single language development?

    For many years, mainstream practice in enterprise software development has been to standardize on a single general purpose language on software projects, with Java and C# today being the mainstream choices. With the rise of interest in DSLs, we may be entering into a phase in which multiple languages on software projects becomes the norm, but not with the same problems of the 80's and early 90's.

  • Wiki-style GUI Layout with Profligacy and LEL

    Profligacy is a new JRuby based GUI library created by Zed Shaw. It's aimed at tackling the GUI layout problem with LEL, a compact Wiki-like notation for GUI layouts.

  • Three approaches to JRuby GUI APIs

    Ruby already has a host of bindings for various GUI toolkits. JRuby now allows the use of Java's Swing and there are already a few libraries trying to make Swing less tedious to work with. We look at the approaches taken in Profligacy, Cheri, and the JavaFX Script clone Swiby.

  • Presentation: Obie Fernandez on Agile DSL Development in Ruby

    Our own InfoQ Ruby editor gives you a primer on using Ruby to develop DSLs with our exclusive presentation from the JAOO conference in Denmark.

  • What's a Ruby DSL and what isn't?

    "Domain Specific Language" (DSL) is a popular buzzword in the Ruby community. Recently, however, doubts about the use of the term arose, particularly because it tends to be used even for ordinary APIs, simply because Ruby allows to omit parentheses. We look at some of the style debates.

  • Google SoC Series: Constraint programming with Ruby

    Constraint programming is a type of logic programming which allows you to define the constraints of a problem and leave it up to the computer to determine a solution. A Google SoC sponsored project will bring constraint programming to Ruby via a binding to the Gecode library. We talked to Andreas Launila, who develops the project.

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