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 3. Working with the Xtend Programming Language

In this chapter, we will introduce the Xtend programming language, a fully featured general purpose Java-like language that is completely interoperable with Java. Xtend has a more concise syntax than Java and provides powerful features such as type inference, extension methods, dispatch methods, and lambda expressions, not to mention multiline template expressions, which are useful when writing code generators. All the aspects of a DSL implemented in Xtext can be implemented in Xtend instead of Java, since it is easier to use and allows you to write better readable code. Since Xtend is completely interoperable with Java, you can reuse all the Java libraries. Moreover, all the Eclipse JDT (Java Development Tools) will work with Xtend seamlessly.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • An introduction to the Xtend programming language

  • A description of the main features of Xtend, which we will use throughout the book