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 Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)


The EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) (Steinberg et al, 2008), http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf, provides code generation facilities for building tools and applications based on structured data models. Most of the Eclipse projects that in some way deal with modeling are based on EMF since it simplifies the development of complex software applications with its mechanisms. The model specification (metamodel) can be described in XMI, XML Schema, Unified Modeling Language (UML), Rational Rose, or annotated Java. It is also possible to specify the metamodel programmatically using Xcore , which was implemented in Xtext. Typically, a metamodel is defined in the Ecore format, which is similar to an implementation of a subset of UML class diagrams.

Note

Pay attention to the meta levels in this context—an Ecore model is a metamodel, since it is a model describing a model. Using the metamodel EMF produces a set of Java classes for the model. If you are not familiar...