Debugger for Declarative DSL for Telecommunication

Development of telecommunication product lines is still a very labor-intensive task, involving a great amount of human resources and producing a large number of development artifacts — code, models, tests, etc. Declarative domain-specific languages (DSLs) may reasonably simplify this process by increasing the level of abstraction. We use the term “declarative” implying that such a DSL does not enable the development of a closed software application, but rather supports creation, generation and maintenance of various kind of software assets — product database, events and event handlers, target code data structures, etc. At the same time, such a DSL may have some executable semantic, but it could be very specific and have many environment-wise requirements. Thus, execution and debugging of such DSL specifications is a meaningful task, which has no common solution due to the unique executable semantic. Consequently, it is not possible to use debug facilities of known DSL environments, such as xtext, MPS, etc. for such a case. In the current paper, we present a debugger for DevM — a declarative DSL intended for support device management in software development in the context of a router product line by a large telecommunication company. We clarify executable semantic for DevM, making it possible to execute DevM specifications in an isolated environment, i.e. in simulation mode, without generation of target code. We use a graphic model-based notation to depict every step of execution. Finally, we implement and integrate the debugger in the DevM IDE, using Debug Adapter Protocol and language server architecture combined with the Eclipse xText/EMF tool chain.

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