DSL’s: a higher abstraction to the rescue

One of the things that bother me is that it is very easy to loose overview in large wired structures and I think DSL’s can limit the distance between specification and implementation. Example of something set up with a very low abstraction in Spring:

    <bean id="fileWritingProcess"
          class="com.xebia.clustering.processes.FileWritingProcess"/>

    <bean id="resequenceProcess"
          class="org.codehaus.prometheus.processors.ResequenceProcess"/>

    <bean id="fileWritingProcessor"
          class="org.codehaus.prometheus.processors.standardprocessor.StandardProcessor">
        <constructor-arg index="0"
                         type="org.codehaus.prometheus.channels.InputChannel"
                         ref="fileWritingProcessor-input"/>
        <constructor-arg index="1">
            <list>
                <ref bean="resequenceProcess"/>
                <ref bean="fileWritingProcess"/>
            </list>
        </constructor-arg>
    </bean>

    <bean id="fileWritingProcessorRepeater"
          class="org.codehaus.prometheus.repeater.ThreadPoolRepeater"
          init-method="start"
          destroy-method="shutdown">
        <constructor-arg index="0">
            <bean class="org.codehaus.prometheus.processors.ProcessorRepeatable">
                <constructor-arg ref="fileWritingProcessor"/>
            </bean>
        </constructor-arg>

        <property name="exceptionHandler">
            <bean class="org.codehaus.prometheus.exceptionhandler.Log4JExceptionHandler"/>
        </property>

        <property name="shutdownAfterFalse"
                  value="true"/>
    </bean>

And this is only 1/4 of the XML configuration.

Or now written in a DSL in Groovy (I’m still playing with the concepts and Groovy, so it could be that the syntax isn’t correct).

def piped = environment{
    queues{
        queue(name:'queue1'),
        queue(name:'queue2'),
        queue(name:'queue3')
    }

    pipeline{
        [parserprocess,
         queue1,
         parallel(threadcount:10){fibonacciprocess},
         queue2,
         parallel(threadcount:10){piprocess},
         queue3,
         [resequenceprocess,filewritingprocess]]
    }
}

I think most can imagine what the last script is doing without knowing anything of the application. That is the power of a DSL.