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How to visualize a Domain Specific Language
Andrey Shchekin made a good point when he commented on my post about graphical DSL:
I do not use DSLs that are purely graphical. But talking about documentation, I think it is very useful to have a graphical _representation_ for some DSLs that is synchronized with (or generated from) the DSL itself.
For example, any workflows or dataflows (think Rhino ETL) are much easier to see at a glance on visual surface. Editing them on visual surface is also an option, but not a requirement.
I certainly am a believer that a DSL should be mostly declarative, and indeed, taking Rhino ETL as an example, it is something that can have a visual representation.
The only remaining question is how?
Long ago there was Lithium and Netron projects, which were good for building the kind of UI that a DSL is composed of. Those have gone commercial now, and while I can probably find the originals somewhere, that is not a very promising concept. There is always the Visual Studio DSL toolkit, but I have a strong suspicion that I would not like it (COM involved), and anyway, I want to do it externally to Visual Studio.
Anyone familiar with useful libraries that can make it happen? Ideally, it would allow me to generate UI similar to the class designer. It should also be simple, but I am not sure how to really quantify that.
Comments
VS2008 Shell is promising.
Graphviz can be great for such things.
http://www.graphviz.org/
Ken, do you have experience with that?
Bruno ,
It doesn't look like it is can be used to create impressive graphs. And it is static.
That is to say, consider the class designer in VS, that is more like what I had in mind.
no.
However, it should allow for creating applications, detached from visual studio itself, that can use the IDE shell. Quite similar to the SharpDevelop component that if I recall correctly, you have used for rhino ETL.
all with a permissive license (as opposed to VS2005 SDK license), and should also be more native, less COM.
all that is from reading white-paper. I'm still waiting to get my hands on a proper 2008 RTM license.
I suppose Peli's QuickGraph (http://www.codeplex.com/quickgraph) can do something like this, since I've seen some cool QuickGraph samples (http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/FunWithGraphs2GettingTheILExecutionGraphUsingQuickGraphAndIlReader.aspx).
Also GLEE (http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/c927728f-8872-4826-80ee-ecb842d10371/Details.aspx) seems interesting though I haven't used it as well.
I tried Microsoft DSLTools and while they can give you the way to define your own designer, I would stay away from them. Way too complex and suited for graphic DSL not a visualization.
A powerful solution would be to write your own visualizer in WPF (it is very powerful and has most potential with zooming or even editing the code inside the representation itself). But it could be quite time-consuming.
I suppose Peli's QuickGraph (http://www.codeplex.com/quickgraph) can do something like this, since I've seen some cool QuickGraph samples (http://blog.dotnetwiki.org/FunWithGraphs2GettingTheILExecutionGraphUsingQuickGraphAndIlReader.aspx).
Also GLEE (http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/c927728f-8872-4826-80ee-ecb842d10371/Details.aspx) seems interesting though I haven't used it as well.
I tried Microsoft DSLTools and while they can give you the way to define your own designer, I would stay away from them. Way too complex and suited for graphic DSL not a visualization.
A powerful solution would be to write your own visualizer in WPF (it is very powerful and has most potential with zooming or even editing the code inside the representation itself). But it could be quite time-consuming.
Netron is still free for non-commercial. The auther is also working in a WPF version. See:
http://www.orbifold.net/default/
Eclipse has the Graphical Editing Framework for creating rich graphical editors.
http://www.eclipse.org/gef/overview.html
Couldn't find a .Net equivalent, though, but that was a while back.
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