Book Image

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition

By : Lorenzo Bettini
4 (1)
Book Image

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition

4 (1)
By: Lorenzo Bettini

Overview of this book

Xtext is an open source Eclipse framework for implementing domain-specific languages together with IDE functionalities. It lets you implement languages really quickly; most of all, it covers all aspects of a complete language infrastructure, including the parser, code generator, interpreter, and more. This book will enable you to implement Domain Specific Languages (DSL) efficiently, together with their IDE tooling, with Xtext and Xtend. Opening with brief coverage of Xtext features involved in DSL implementation, including integration in an IDE, the book will then introduce you to Xtend as this language will be used in all the examples throughout the book. You will then explore the typical programming development workflow with Xtext when we modify the grammar of the DSL. Further, the Xtend programming language (a fully-featured Java-like language tightly integrated with Java) will be introduced. We then explain the main concepts of Xtext, such as validation, code generation, and customizations of runtime and UI aspects. You will have learned how to test a DSL implemented in Xtext with JUnit and will progress to advanced concepts such as type checking and scoping. You will then integrate the typical Continuous Integration systems built in to Xtext DSLs and familiarize yourself with Xbase. By the end of the book, you will manually maintain the EMF model for an Xtext DSL and will see how an Xtext DSL can also be used in IntelliJ.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface to the second edition
14
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Global scoping


Xtext has a default mechanism for global scoping that allows you to refer to elements defined in a different file, possibly in a different project of the workspace; in particular, it uses the dependencies of the Eclipse projects. For Java projects, it uses the classpath of the projects. Of course, this mechanism relies on the global index.

Note

Global scoping is implied by the fact that the default scoping mechanism always relies on an outer scope that consists of the visible object descriptions in the index.

With the default configuration in the MWE2, this mechanism for global scoping works out of the box. You can experiment with a project with some SmallJava files. You will see that you can refer to the SmallJava classes defined in another file; content assist works accordingly.

Before proceeding to the use of global scoping, it is worthwhile to learn how to write JUnit tests that concern several input programs.

As hinted in the section The index, when running in a plain Java...