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

Customizations of IDE concepts


In this section, we show typical concepts of the IDE for your DSL that you may want to customize. Xtext shows its usability in this context as well, since, as you will see, it reduces the customization effort.

Labels

Xtext UI classes make use of an ILabelProvider interface to obtain textual labels and icons through its methods getText and getImage, respectively. ILabelProvider is a standard component of Eclipse JFace-based viewers. You can see the label provider in action in the Outline view and in content assist proposal popups (as well as in various other places).

Xtext provides a default implementation of a label provider for all DSLs, which does its best to produce a sensible representation of the EMF model objects using the name feature, if it is found in the corresponding object class, and a default image. You can see that in the Outline view when editing an entities file, refer to the following screenshot:

However, you surely want to customize the representation...