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

The Xtext generator


Xtext uses the MWE2 (Modeling Workflow Engine 2) DSL to configure the generation of its artifacts. The generated .mwe2 file already comes with good defaults; thus, for the moment, we will not modify it. However, it is interesting to know that by tweaking this file we can request the Xtext generator to generate support for additional features, as we will see later in this book.

Note

In order to deal with additional platforms besides Eclipse, such as IntelliJ and Web editors (Chapter 11 , Continuous Integration), in Xtext 2.9, a brand new generator infrastructure has been introduced, which also aims at simplifying the overall configuration of the generated artifacts. This new generator is completely different from the old one. However, the old generator is still present in Xtext so that projects created before Xtext 2.9 still work and do not need to migrate to the new generator immediately. This book will always use the new generator.

During the MWE2 workflow execution, Xtext...