Domain-Specific Deployment and Configuration Language for Composition and Adaptation of Coarse-Grained Services

Domain-specific languages promise an unprecedented integration of business and IT aspects in software development. This translates into a stronger focus on user requirements, higher adaptability, and shorter time-to-market. DSLs provide the opportunity to bring business actors and IT experts closer together by raising the mutual understanding of the models underpinning software development. A closer cooperation in modeling improves the understanding of systems and allows for experimentation. Business actors can identify their business processes and resources in the models and can experiment with them. This paper presents work-in-progress addressing a model layer for the dynamic composition and adaptation of coarse-grained web services through configuration information. Our domain-specific configuration language (DSCL) enables IT experts and business actors to concentrate on model representations that reflect individually tailored compositions of generic portal services. Our approach fosters modeling on two different levels of abstraction. Business actors define high-level models focusing on the definition of processes across coarse-grained services. Low-level concepts complete technical aspects that are abstracted away in high-level concepts.