Domain-specific language for generating administrative process applications

Some organizations end up reimplementing the same class of business process over and over from scratch: An "administrative process", which consists of managing a structured document (usually a form) through several states and involving various roles in the organization. This results in wasted time that could be dedicated to better understanding the process or dealing with the fine details that are specific to the process. Existing virtual office solutions require specific training and infrastructure and may result in vendor lock-in. In this paper, we propose using a high-level domain-specific language to describe the administrative process and a separate code generator targeting a standard web framework. We have implemented the approach using Xtext, EGL and the Django web framework, and we illustrate it through a case study.