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

Integration with the Eclipse build mechanism


It is time to see our generator in action: launch Eclipse, create a Java Project in the workspace, and in the src folder, create a new .entities file (remember to accept to convert the project to an Xtext project, otherwise the generator will not run). Continue by adding one or more entities with some attributes. Note that a src-gen folder is automatically created as soon as you save the file. At this point, you should also add this generated folder to the projects source folders by navigating to Build Path | Use as Source Folder. Exploring the content of the src-gen folder, you will find a generated Java class for each entity in your .entities file. You can see an example in the following screenshot:

Note

Observe that a code generator just creates text. Other components have to make sense of that, for example, a Java compiler. That is why we need to add the src-gen folder to the project source folders: this way, the Eclipse Java compiler automatically...