Bootstrapping DSLs from user interfaces

Implementation of domain-specific languages (DSLs) is supported by powerful tools that can automatically generate various artifacts from the language specification. Domain analysis and design of a language, however, are usually done manually. Automatic extraction of domain information can be used to generate preliminary version of the language specification and therefore bootstrap the development process. One of the most suitable sources of domain information are graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper we present the experiment validating this approach. Several existing applications were automatically analyzed to extract their domain models and generate a DSL processor based on them.