Zeta - A Set of Textual DSLs to Define Graphical DSLs

Domain-specific modeling is increasingly adopted in the software development industry. While textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) already have a wide impact, graphical DSLs still need to live up to their full potential. In this paper, we describe an approach to automatically generate a graphical DSL from a set of textual languages. With our approach, node and edge type graphical DSLs can be described using textual models. A set of carefully designed textual DSLs is the input for our generators. The result of the generation is a graphical editor for the intended domain. The development time for a graphical editor is reduced significantly. The whole project is available as open source under the name "Zeta". This publication focuses on the explanation of the textual DSLs for defining a graphical node and edge editor.