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

The Expressions DSL with Xbase


For the first example of the use of Xbase, we implement a DSL similar to the Expressions DSL that we presented in Chapter 8, An Expression Language, which we call as Xbase Expressions DSL; this DSL is inspired by the Scripting Language DSL of the seven languages examples.

Creating the project

Let's create a new project with the following settings:

  • Project name: org.example.xbase.expressions

  • Name: org.example.xbase.expressions.Expressions

  • Extensions: xexpressions

Before running the MWE2 generator for the first time, you should modify the grammar so that it uses the Xbase grammar, not the Terminals grammar:

grammar org.example.xbase.expressions.Expressions with   org.eclipse.xtext.xbase.Xbase

Since our grammar now inherits from the Xbase grammar, all the Xbase grammar rules are in effect in our DSL.

Note

When using Xbase, some files in the projects will contain lots of warnings of the shape:

Discouraged access: The method ... from the type ... is not accessible...