A Domain-Specific Language for the Document-Based Model-Driven Engineering of Business Applications

To facilitate the development of business applications, a domain-specific language (DSL), called DARC, is introduced in this paper. Business documents including the descriptions of the responsibilities, authorizations, and collaborations, are used as the first-class entities during model-driven engineering (MDE) with DARC. Hence the implementation of the business applications can be automatically achieved from the corresponding document models. The evaluation of using DARC DSL for the development of commercial business software was performed in an international sales, logistics, and service solution provider company. The results showed that the code for all business documents and more than 50% of the responsibility descriptions composing the business applications could be generated automatically by modeling with DARC. Finally, according to the users’ feedback, the assessment clearly revealed the adoption of DARC features in terms of the DSL quality characteristics, namely functional suitability, usability, reliability, maintainability, productivity, extensibility, compatibility, and expressiveness.