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

Your DSL editor on the Web


In this section, we briefly show the mechanisms of Xtext that allow you to port the editor for your DSL to the web. The web editor for your DSL will be implemented in JavaScript. This editor will then communicate to a server side component, which implements all Xtext related aspects. The server consists of a Java servlet and communications take place through HTTP requests. This way, the runtime implementation of your DSL will be reused by the server-side component and UI aspects will be rendered on the web accordingly. The set of UI features available on the web editor depends on the JavaScript text editor library being used. The default one is Ace, but Orion and CodeMirror can also be enabled. For further details and more advanced features, we refer to the Xtext documentation, section Web Editor Support.

Let's create a new Xtext project:

  1. Project name: org.example.hell oweb

  2. Name: org.example.helloweb.HelloWeb

  3. Extensions: helloweb

  4. Press Next.

  5. In the next page, select...