Managing the Production and Evolution of e-learning Tools with Attribute Grammars

Many e-learning tools are based on domain-specific languages (DSLs) targeted to the educational domain. Thus, methods and techniques from the programming language community can help in developing these tools. In this paper, we show how attribute grammars, a well-known declarative specification method for the syntax and semantics of programming languages, can facilitate the production and subsequent evolution of e-learning tools. We also describe how we produced and extended, a courseware system supporting an XML-based DSL, by using XLOP (XML Language-Oriented Processing), a meta-tool supporting attribute grammars for the development of XML processing applications.