A Web-Based Graphical Environment for Using DSLs in Lightning

The Lightning tool provides an environment for developing modeling languages based on Alloy. The existing Lightning tool cannot edit language models with the concrete syntax applied. The object of this study is to equip the tool with the capability to generate web-based graphical editors for the domain specific languages modeled in Lightning. The requirements for a web editor that is user friendly and allows the editing of visual languages were defined. For a subset of those requirements an editor allowing the edition of language models conforming to a Lightning language was designed and implemented. The validity of those models can be checked with respect to some basic constraints present in the definition of the language of the meta-model. We validated our work by analyzing how well the editor fulfills the requirements. The effectiveness of the editor was tested in a case study.