After a program written in your DSL has been parsed and validated, you might want to do something with the parsed EMF model, that is, the AST of that program. Typically, you may want to generate code in another language, for example, Java code, a configuration file, XML, a text file, and so on. In all of these cases, you will need to write a code generator.
Since the parsed program is an EMF model, you can use any EMF framework which somehow deals with code generation. Of course, you might also use plain Java to generate code, after all, as we saw in the previous chapters, you have all the Java APIs to access the EMF model.
However, in this book, we will use Xtend (introduced in Chapter 3, Working with the Xtend Programming Language) to write code generators, since it is very well suited for the task.
Xtext automatically integrates your code generator into the Eclipse build infrastructure. All we have to deal with is producing the desired output, for example...