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

IntelliJ and Gradle


In version 2.9, Xtext introduced the support for IntelliJ IDEA, another famous IDE, https://www.jetbrains.com/idea. Thus, an Xtext DSL can be developed in Eclipse but it can also target IntelliJ and an installable version of the DSL for IntelliJ can be provided to its users. In this section, we will briefly describe the procedure for achieving IntelliJ integration.

In order to compile the projects that implement IntelliJ integration of an Xtext DSL, you need to use Gradle, http://gradle.org. Gradle is another build system, which has been gaining lot of attention and interest lately. In particular, it is the official build system for Android applications. Differently from Maven, Gradle configuration files are written in Groovy, http://www.groovy-lang.org, not in XML, thus, they are less verbose and easier to write and read. Moreover, Gradle is much more flexible than Maven, which is known to have a rigid structure. Gradle is also able to reuse all the Java libraries available...