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This report provides an intuitive description of the DASL1
application modeling language, followed by a formal language
specification. DASL was originally developed as part of the Ace
research project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories to bridge the gap
between high level application modeling languages, such as UML, and
the current implementation languages and middleware in which
applications are written, such as JavaTM,
J2EETM, and evolving middleware based on web services. The
primary goal of the research was to seek a sweet spot between the
elegant abstractions possible in UML and the implementations one can
express in Java, by creating a complete application modeling language
that captures the application's semantics completely and globally. The
resultant modeling language is effectively a domain-specific language
for a very large domain of distributed business applications. At its
core, it is a textual language that, like Java and most 3GLs, is
easily read and understood by people. The textual language is tied to
a well-defined metamodel that supports a graphical, UML view. The DASL
deployment engine converts an application "model" directly into
executable code, bypassing hand coding of an implementation "model."
DASL vastly simplifies the process of storyboarding, prototyping, and
implementing these applications by placing the focus on business
semantics, the "what", rather than the implementation details of a
particular architecture, the "how."
In essence, DASL technology is a practical realization of the MDA
(Model Driven Architecture) vision to "separate business or
application logic from underlying platform technology" and thus
"insulate business applications from technology evolution."
1. DASL stands for Distributed Application Specification
Language, and is pronounced dazzle.
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