As we have seen throughout the examples of this book, it is straightforward to implement a DSL with Xtext. This is particularly true when you only need to care about structural aspects; in the Entities DSL of Chapter 2, Creating Your First Xtext Language, we only defined the structure of entities. Things become more complicated when it comes to implementing expressions in a DSL; as we have seen in Chapter 8, An Expression Language, we need to define many rules in the grammar using left factoring to avoid left recursion, even when we only deal with a limited number of expressions. Besides the grammar, the validation part also becomes more complex due to type checking. When we mix structures and expressions, such as in the SmallJava DSL, the complexity increases again; in addition to advanced type checking (Chapter 9, Type Checking), we also need to take care of scoping (Chapter 10, Scoping), that is implied by relations such as inheritance. An inheritance relation also...
Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition
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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend - Second Edition
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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
Free Chapter
Implementing a DSL
Creating Your First Xtext Language
Working with the Xtend Programming Language
Validation
Code Generation
Customizing Xtext Components
Testing
An Expression Language
Scoping
Continuous Integration
Xbase
Advanced Topics
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index
Customer Reviews