Making sense of EveXL, a DSL for context awareness

The development of reactive, context aware mobile applications can be a complex task. EveWorks is an engine that provides event detection capabilities to other applications in mobile platforms, interfacing with them through expressions written in EveXL, its own domain-specific language. EveXL is built around simple, everyday concepts, like intervals of time and temporal relations and simplicity has been one of the driving goals for its development. To validate if this goal has been met, we have developed a videogame that implements its reactive behavior through EveWorks and asks players to read and interpret EveXL expressions. We have tested the game with players having little to no programming experience and results were very encouraging, indicating that EveXL is easy to understand and its concepts easily grasped.