language parallax

Earlier this year I began work on a project to help define my interest in program transformation and programming language engineering (metametamodeling and metamodeling). The first task was to define a DSL and a projection from that DSL to a functional web platform. Not having one available, I threw together a very incomplete language for stringing together web forms which I intended to be used for business processes like invoice approval.

Now that I have a little time to rework the project, my first step is to strengthen the DSL. What I may do instead is use an existing language: BPEL. The Business Process Execution Language. See the wikipedia entry.

There are a number of projects relating to this language. Eclipse, as usual, is devoting some effort to this area. Active Endpoints has ActiveBPEL (see some of their examples here). The Wikipedia page makes mention of BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Siebel Systems being involved with the standard from the beginning.

My task for September will likely to build my own BPEL engine. I probably won’t be able to implement more than a small fraction of the standard, but as usual with this project the higher priority is a “vertical slice” through all the various languages and tools.

The task after that is to make more progress implementing refactorings for BPEL and all of the platform languages (many — but not all — of which are xml based).