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

Testing the UI


Most of the mechanisms of a DSL implemented in Xtext can be tested with plain Java JUnit tests without a UI environment. However, when testing UI features, tests need a running Eclipse.

Eclipse provides a specific launch configuration, "JUnit Plug-in Test", which executes JUnit tests with a running Eclipse.

Implementing tests for the UI concepts might be tricky, since usually you will need to write code to set up Eclipse workbench infrastructures such as projects, files, and so on. Xtext provides some base classes for testing UI concepts, which do most of the job for you so that you can simply test specific features without having to worry about the setup steps.

All the UI tests we implement in this section are created in the project org.example.entities.ui.tests.

Note

The examples in this section do not necessarily represent valuable tests; they should be seen as starting points for more complex tests of more complex DSLs.

Testing the content assist

In the Entities DSL, we did not...