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

SmallJava


The language we develop in this chapter is a simplified version of Java, called SmallJava. This language does not aim at being useful in practice and cannot be used to write real programs such as Java. However, SmallJava contains enough language features that will allow us to explore advanced type checking techniques that can also be reused for other DSLs, which have OOP mechanisms such as inheritance and subtyping.

The implementation we see in this chapter will not be complete, since some features of this language, such as correct member access, will be implemented in the next chapter when we introduce the mechanism of local and global scoping. In a Java-like language type checking and scoping are tightly connected and complement each other; for the sake of readability, we will split typing and scoping into two separate chapters.

We will not describe how to write a code generator for SmallJava; we will focus on statically checking SmallJava programs rather than executing them. However...