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

JUnit 4


JUnit is the most popular unit test framework for Java, and it is shipped with Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT). In particular, the examples in this book are based on JUnit version 4.

To implement JUnit tests, you just need to write a class with methods annotated with @org.junit.Test. We will call such methods simply test methods. Such Java or Xtend classes can then be executed in Eclipse using the JUnit test launch configuration. All methods annotated with @Test will be then executed by JUnit. In test methods you can use assert methods provided by the org.junit.Assert class. For example, assertEquals(expected, actual) checks whether the two arguments are equal; assertTrue(expression) checks whether the passed expression evaluates to true. If an assertion fails, JUnit will record such failure. In Eclipse, the JUnit view will provide you with a report about tests that failed. Ideally, no test should fail, and you should see the green bar in the JUnit view.

Tip

All test methods can...