Rapid software prototyping using visual language techniques

Rapid prototyping of domain-specific software requires a systematic software development methodology and user-friendly tools. Being both executable and easy to use, visual languages and their automatic generation mechanisms are highly suitable for software prototyping. This paper presents a software prototyping methodology based on the visual language generation technology, that allows visual prototyping languages to be specified and generated using an expressive graph grammar formalism. Executable prototypes and their verification and code generation are made possible by syntax-directed computations. The paper demonstrates this methodology through a prototyping example built on our current implementation.