What are domain-specific languages?
A domain-specific language (DSL) is a language designed to be useful for a specific task in a fixed problem domain, in contrast to a general-purpose language. DSLs are gaining popularity in the field of software engineering to enhance productivity, maintainability, and reusability of software artifacts, and enable expression and validation of concepts at the level of abstraction of the problem domain. Using domain-specific languages, one can build customized modeling tools and essentially define a new modeling language and implement it very simply. For example, a specialized language may be used to describe a user interface, a business process, a database, or the flow of information, and then used to generate code from those descriptions. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects includes several high-quality visual designers, based on domain-specific languages, for the design of distributed systems and the validation of those systems with a logical datacenter.
