Moldable Tools

Development tools offer the lenses through which developers perceive and reason about their software systems. Generic development tools, while having a wide range of applicability, ignore the contextual nature of software systems and do not allow developers to directly reason in terms of domain abstractions. To overcome this problem, we propose to embed domain abstractions into development tools through the design of moldable tools that support the inexpensive creation of domain-specific extensions, and that automatically select extensions based on the domain model and the developer's interaction with the domain model. This solution aims to reduce the cost of creating extensions by providing precise extension points together with internal DSLs for configuring common types of extensions. This solution facilitates automatic discovery by enabling extension creators to specify together with an extension an activation predicate that captures the context in which that extension is applicable.