A DSL for executable 'how to' manuals

Status
Published in the Proceedings of SAC 2016

Authors
Marcel Heinz and Philipp Helsper and Ralf Lämmel and Tobias M. Schmidt

Abstract
'How to' manuals are an established means of helping po- tential users with deploying software technologies such as web applications or servers. As part of a domain analysis for 'how to' manuals, we survey existing 'how to' manuals to assess the feasibility of making the manuals executable and to derive a suggestion for domain-specific language support for executable 'how to' manuals. We realize a DSL for executable 'how to' manuals and refer to the approach as 'literate deployment scripting', as it is inspired by literate programming in that all the code for deployment and configuration is embedded into an HTML manual. This includes code (scripts) to be executed along working through the manual as well as possibly code contributing to the sys- tem under deployment.

Keywords
Software deployment. Software documentation. Software manuals. Literate programming. Domain-specific languages.

Bibtex entry
@inproceedings{HeinzEtAl16,
  author    = {Marcel Heinz and Philipp Helsper and Ralf L\"ammel and Tobias M. Schmidt},
  title     = "{A DSL for executable `how to' manuals}",
  booktitle = "{Proc.\ of SAC 2016}",
  year      = {2016},
  publisher = "ACM",
  note      = "3 pages"
}

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