Book Image

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

By : Lorenzo Bettini
Book Image

Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

By: Lorenzo Bettini

Overview of this book

Xtext is an open source Eclipse framework for implementing domain-specific languages together with its IDE functionalities. It lets you implement languages really quickly, and, most of all, it covers all aspects of a complete language infrastructure, starting from the parser, code generator, interpreter, and more. "Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend" will teach you how to develop a DSL with Xtext, an Eclipse framework for implementing domain-specific languages. The chapters are like tutorials that describe the main concepts of Xtext such as grammar definition, validation, code generation, customizations, and many more, through uncomplicated and easy-to-understand examples. Starting with briefly covering the features of Xtext that are involved in a 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. We then proceed by explaining the main concepts of Xtext, such as validation, code generation, and customizations of runtime and UI aspects. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to test a DSL implemented in Xtext with Junit, in order to follow a test-driven development strategy that will help the developer implement maintainable code that is much faster and cleaner. A test-driven approach is used throughout the book when presenting advanced concepts such as type checking and scoping. The book also shows you how to build and release a DSL so that it can be installed in Eclipse, and gives you hints on how to build the DSL headlessly in a continuous integration server. "Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend" aims to complement the official Xtext documentation to explain the main concepts through simplified examples and to teach the best practices for a DSL implementation in Xtext. It is a Beginner's Guide which should set you up for professional development DSL and its Eclipse IDE tooling.

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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend
Lorenzo Bettini
Aug, 2013 | 342 pages
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Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend
Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Implementing a DSL
Implementing a DSL
Domain Specific Languages
Implementing a DSL
IDE integration
Enter Xtext
The aim of this book
Summary
2
Creating Your First Xtext Language
Creating Your First Xtext Language
A DSL for entities
The Xtext generator
The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)
Improvements to the DSL
Summary
3
The Xtend Programming Language
The Xtend Programming Language
An introduction to Xtend
Xtend – a better Java with less "noise"
Debugging Xtend code
Summary
4
Validation
Validation
Validation in Xtext
Quickfixes
Summary
5
Code Generation
Code Generation
Introduction to code generation
Writing a code generator in Xtend
Integration with the Eclipse build mechanism
Standalone command-line compiler
Summary
6
Customizations
Customizations
Dependency injection
Google Guice in Xtext
Customizations of IDE concepts
Custom formatting
Other customizations
Summary
7
Testing
Testing
Introduction to testing
Junit 4
The ISetup interface
Implementing tests for your DSL
Test suite
Testing the UI
Testing and modularity
Clean code
Summary
8
An Expression Language
An Expression Language
The Expressions DSL
The grammar for the Expressions DSL
Left recursive grammars
Forward references
Typing expressions
Writing an interpreter
Summary
9
Type Checking
Type Checking
SmallJava
First validation rules
Type checking
Improving the UI
Summary
10
Scoping
Scoping
Cross-reference resolution in Xtext
Custom scoping
Global scoping
Providing a library
Dealing with super
What to put in the index?
Additional automatic features
Summary
11
Building and Releasing
Building and Releasing
Release engineering
Introduction to Buckminster
Using the Xtext Buckminster wizard
Maintaining the examples of this book
Summary
12
Xbase
Xbase
Getting introduced with Xbase
The Expressions DSL with Xbase
The Entities DSL with Xbase
Customizations
Summary
13
Bibliography
Bibliography
Index
Index

About the Reviewers

Dr. Jan Koehnlein is a core committer of the Xtext project and the Xtend language. He has several years of experience in model-driven software development and on the Eclipse platform. Jan is currently working as a consultant and software architect for itemis in Germany.

Henrik Lindberg has worked for many companies since the early 80s, and he has had the opportunity to work with most aspects of software development from operating systems to applications as a developer, architect, CTO, and founder.

He is currently CTO and founder of Cloudsmith Inc, a Puppet Labs Inc. partner specializing in services and tools for the creation, testing, and deployment of software stacks in local and cloud infrastructures. Prior to Cloudsmith, he ran the BEA/JRockit development office (now Oracle's JVM division).

Henrik always had a passion for computer languages and parser technology, and he has worked with Eclipse Xtext on several projects, most recently the Puppet Language IDE called Geppetto. He is an Eclipse committer on Eclipse p2 and leads the Eclipse Buckminster and b3 projects. He is a frequent contributor to the Xtext forum.

You can contact him on Twitter as @hel and also on the Eclipse and Puppet IRCs with the tag helindbe as well as on the Eclipse forums.

I would like to thank Carl Barks and The Junior Woodchucks Guidebook that in an early Swedish edition contained a section with the Woodchucks Crypto—this inspired me to invent several written and spoken languages that I tried to teach my friends. This had limited success, we were after all only 7 years old.

Pedro J. Molina is a practitioner and researcher in the field of model-driven development. From his masters thesis in 1998 to his PhD in 2004, he worked on the research of conceptual user interface patterns for code generation on business applications and published more than 20 papers and 2 books.

Within industry, he has been working for CARE Technologies developing commercial code generators and doing consultancy and software architecture for Capgemini. Nowadays, he is the chief architect officer for Icinetic, a firm building modeling and code generation tools with a strong focus on architecture.

Pedro has been taking part in the program committee for Code Generation Conference for the last 7 years and keeps up-to-date with industrial MDD efforts. He maintains a blog: The Metalevel, where he talks about MDD and code-generation at http://pjmolina.com/metalevel.

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