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 14. Conclusions

By the end of this book, you should have a good knowledge of Xtext and Xtend and their mechanisms. You should be able to implement even a complex DSL and all its aspects, both concerning the runtime and the UI. If your DSL needs to inter-operate with Java and its type system, you should really consider adopting Xbase in your DSL, since this will save you from implementing most aspects, including the type system and the code generator.

However, this book could not cover all the details of Xtext, so while developing your DSL you might have to face problems that this book did not even mention.

For this reason, you should always keep the official Xtext documentation at hand. As we said in the book, you find the documentation online at: https://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/documentation/. Remember that the Xtext documentation is also available in your Eclipse, navigating to Help | Help Contents | Xtext Documentation. The same holds for the Xtend programming language, whose documentation...