Developing a Domain Specific Language in Gremlin

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are used by programmers to increase the expressivity of their code within a specific domain, making it easier for non-programmers to communicate with developers. DSLs abstract away low-level programming constructs in favor of higher level ones that better link to the elements of the domain itself. In the context of Pearson's OpenClass platform, a Gremlin-based DSL is used to extend the graph model into a programmatic construct, allowing engineers and analysts to ask questions of the graph in their educational domain language. The OpenClass DSL defines the graph schema, extends the Gremlin graph traversal language into the language of education, provides standalone functions that operate over these extensions, and exposes algorithms developed from those extensions and functions. This coarsely-grained API helps bring general accessibility to complex graph traversals.