Language Opener

OpenL demystifies a language implementation process allowing professional programmers to decide which language features are good and which are not for their real-world applications.  You do not have to wait for years when “big guys” will do it for you or waste time for artificial workarounds. While OpenL encourages developers not to be shy when a new language configuration is required, it comes with a built-in implementation of Java known as "openl.j".

OpenL allows a developer to create and maintain different language configurations. Any application today is based on a combination of specific software packages. When we say that an application is based on Java, we usually assume a specific version of Java plus a set of the used Java packages with their specific versions, e.g. Java 1.4.1_02 + Xerces2.0.4.  It is enough just to look at MDA-based or SOA-based architectures to see an enormous number of inter-related components of the proper language configurations. The exact definition of the Language Configuration and other terms can be found in the OpenL Glossary.

Key features for OpenL-based languages:
- Context-free grammar
- Configurable business context
- Open type system
- Strong type checking.

Each language configuration is specified explicitly by its name and consists of three key components: Parser, Binder and Virtual Machine. Here is the OpenL Functional Model:

OpenL Language Configuration includes:
1) Context-free grammar that specifies a language syntax. The grammar Parser parses an OpenL code and creates a valid syntax tree (or points to an error) without knowing yet an actual context.
2) Configurable binding context that defines data types. Based on a context, the Binder assigns types to all elements of the syntax tree and makes sure that all used operations are valid in this particular context. It converts the syntax tree into semantic tree.
3) Virtual Machine (similar to JVM) executes the semantic tree in run-time.

Along with a strong type checking facility, this approach allows an OpenL to access directly objects defined in different sources such as Java, MS Office files, DB, XML including XML Schema, WSDL, RDF, etc. You may use familiar Java syntax to deal with objects defined in an XML file, in an Excel spreadsheet, or in an SQL table as if they were a described in a Java class without necessity to create such classes. No intermediate Java classes are generated either. Moreover, the same OpenL code can naturally work with objects coming from different object sources without knowing their origin.

OpenL components themselves are implemented using Java. As a result, it does not matter how limited your particular configuration of an OpenL language is, you always can add to this configuration any existing Java package to take advantage of the existing Java class library.

OpenL can be used as a foundation for a powerful development environments that require pieces of Java-like code to be maintained outside traditional Java IDEs. Original developers of OpenL have used it to create the first full-scale Business Rules Management Framework OpenRules. We expect that the proper development teams will use OpenL (instead of fighting with a pure Java) to implement a workflow management framework such as BPELJ,  Web application development, database management, software configuration, and other practical frameworks.