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

Google Guice in Xtext


All Xtext components rely on Google Guice dependency injection, even the classes that Xtext generates for your DSL. This means that in your classes, if you need to use a class from Xtext, you just have to declare a field of such type with the @Inject annotation.

The injection mechanism allows a DSL developer to customize basically every component of the Xtext framework. This boils down to another property of dependency injection, which, in fact, inverts dependencies. The Xtext runtime can use your classes without having a dependency to its implementer. Instead, the implementer has a dependency on the interface defined by the Xtext runtime. For this reason, dependency injection is said to implement inversion of control and the dependency inversion principle.

When running the MWE2 workflow, Xtext generates both a fully configured module and an empty module that inherits from the generated one. This allows you to override generated or default bindings. Customizations are...