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

Chapter 11. Continuous Integration

In this chapter, we describe how you can release your DSL implementation by creating an Eclipse update site, also known as p2 repository. In this way, others can install it in Eclipse. The Xtext project wizard can create a project for such an update site. Moreover, Xtext can create the infrastructure for building with Maven/Tycho. This will allow you to build and test your DSL implementation on a continuous integration server. We will also show how to get a web application with a web editor for your DSL; the Xtext project wizard will generate it and reuse most of the components you develop for your DSL. Finally, your DSL implementation can be easily ported to IntelliJ; to this aim, Xtext generates the infrastructure for building with Gradle, a build system alternative to Maven.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • How to create an update site for your DSL

  • Some general concepts about release engineering and continuous integration

  • How to build and test...