Domain specific language (DSL)

[David Bovill]

On 14 October 2010 07:33, Michael Allan <mike at zelea.com> wrote:

>
> What integration problem are you trying to solve?  It's difficult to
> visualize, at first glance, where a DSL might fit for that purpose.
>

Let's separate two things out. A vision of distributed LD for general open
political emergent debate, and deployments for a particular group, or
application area. We could call these vertical and horizontal markets for
short. I'm interested in the former, but see it a a better strategy to
bootstrap this on the latter.

If we think therefore of getting a good quality trial up in a vertical
market, where we get a sponsor to pay for things like consultation, user
support, face-to-face meetings, and graphic design / UX work. In this
scenario, we can look at Votorolla as a Java based backend for LD that can
sit on a single server.

The integration I have in mind is therefore to integrate Votorolla as a Java
project, with OCO as a Ruby on Rails project (which at the moment has simple
voting), and another Java project which has a good backend for secure
digital currencies. The richest, and most elegant way to integrate these
three things I feel would be to wrap each in a higher level DSL written in
Groovy, with the aim of making it simpler to write custom organisational
structures.


> The larger system is physically distributed across a network of
> independent hosts, including many pollservers and codebases (not all
> Votorola) and multiple host/component types (not all pollservers).
> That's too loose of a configuration for a DSL to come to grips with,
> isn't it?  Ad hoc network protocols are probably the best glue for
> that purpose, at least in the beginning, when we're still prototyping
> and experimenting.
>

At this stage I am taking a careful look, the base decision is to use web
services as you indicate, however it does seem that it is difficult to
really get this going for a number of soft reasons.

Each of the projects likes the idea of web services, but as it is never a
priority, they don't really get round to implementing them or supporting
them fully. There is always another feature of bug to fix in their code
base. The centres of gravity in each project pull them apart, and people
like me trying to integrate these tools around practical projects which need
custom front ends created find it increasingly difficult to pull the pieces
together.

The other approach is to fork each of the code bases and bring them together
on a single server. However then you are faced with the problem of
maintaining the overall integration, and you end up with these big CMS type
projects, which is a no-no.

My latest thinking on this problem is that it may be easier to achieve a
productive integration in the area of DSL's and the JVM. My guess, and that
is all it is at this stage, is that this area is technically good enough
(speed, robustness, unerlying concepts), socially integrative enough
(programmers from different languages will be able to get involved), and
cool enough to attract good developers to the project.

As a practical example - I am not going to learn Java, to get involved in
coding Votorolla, but I would learn Groovy, and it looks easy enough and
interesting enough for me to be able to wrap existing Votorolla Java classes
in a DSL which I can start using in projects. The same goes for other
projects, and if that applies to me, it will apply to a Ruby programmer, or
a Python programmer.

However I am not a Java programmer, and I am not familiar with the innards
of Votorolla, so i would value your thoughts on this. What I'd like to do is
start hosting Votorolla on a good virtual host, and start work personally on
creating a wrapper for it in Groovy (eventually leading to a DSL), so that
we have the added flexibility of being able to create Ruby on Rails like
sites (ie in Grails) with embedded Liquid Democracy. The added benefits of
being able to work in the same technical domian as the digital currency and
legal projects I've spoke of are just a bonus.

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