Advanced capabilities
DSL and language engineering are Automata’s technical niche: evidence of unusual engineering depth, available to organizations that need specialized languages, modeling tools, or developer environments.
The niche
When a domain is complex enough, generic configuration stops working. Organizations then need languages, editors, and validation built for exactly their concepts — so domain experts can express rules directly, and errors are caught before they reach production.
This is a rare discipline. Automata combines academic research in language design and model-driven engineering with production software delivery: tools that domain experts can actually use, not research prototypes.
Capabilities
Syntax, semantics, and validation shaped around your domain.
Full language definitions with parsers and generators.
Type-safe builders and embedded languages for JVM environments.
Complete language workbenches for Eclipse/JVM and VS Code/web.
Highlighting, completion, diagnostics, refactoring via the Language Server Protocol.
Execution environments where domain experts test specifications safely before deployment.
Model-driven engineering with formal constraints and generated artifacts.
Linters, analyzers, and generators for internal languages and frameworks.
Evidence
A toolset for Interface Automata theories — shared-memory and modal interface automata. A textual modelling language, composition and refinement checking, a simulator and debugger, and a language-server editor with a VS Code extension. Developed with the Software Technologies research group at the University of Bamberg; Automata’s founder is a lead contributor.
View repository →A domain-specific language for configuring and modelling model railways: railway resources, interlocking functions, and route logic. The bahnc compiler generates YAML configurations, SCCharts models, and C code; the editors are an Eclipse-based IDE and a VS Code extension. Built on Xtext.
View repository →These are academic and personal research projects — evidence of capability, not commercial client work. The BahnDSL work is accompanied by a master’s thesis in domain-specific language design; the thesis implementation, which integrates BahnDSL with the SWTbahn model-railway control stack, is public: swtbahn-cli-thesis.
When to engage us
This is a specialist service, not a mainstream offering. We take a limited number of language-engineering engagements each year, and only where senior involvement makes a meaningful difference.
If your domain needs its own language, tooling, or modeling environment, start with a conversation.