At the recently concluded OOPSLA 2006, Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce had presented a paper on Embedded Domain-Specific Language in Java. In the paper presented they have described the evolution of jMock from a framework to a domain specific language embedded in Java. They have also explained how it occurred, EDSLs, their limitations and how Java and C# work as host languages for them. The advantages of EDSLs were highlighted and the common occurrence of EDSLs in small syntax language and the problems faced with large syntax language such as Java. Besides this a detailed discussion of jMock was also highlighted.

In the conclusion they stated that efforts must be made to ensure that the framework works well in modern IDE and scaling EDSLs into complex languages might not be a right thing to do as it becomes difficult to read the code.

Overall the paper deals with their experiences of evolving domain specific language embedded in Java over a number of test framework. Click here to read the paper.