Xtext Tricks #1: Enhancing Completion Proposals
Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have noticed I am working on an Xtext based DSL for Behaviour Driven Development. Part of the DSL allows the DSL user to define actors and the verbs these actors can execute. Actors can have a hierarchy (much like a class hierarchy), meaning an actor will inherit all verbs of it's super actors. As the list of verbs can grow quite a bit, the content assist drop down menu becomes a bit overwhelming.
To alleviate this situation, I decided to display the "owner" of a verb along with the name of the verb in the content assist drop down box. Here is my first try:
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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Modeling (But Were Afraid To Ask)
- Does Model Driven Software Development actually work?
- Are some developers more productive than others?
- What happens during code generation?
- Do diagrams and text go together well?
- What happens during model transformation?
- What are DSLs? And can I create them with Eclipse?
- Does modeling scale in the enterprise?
You guessed it, these are not the questions from a well-know Woody Allen movie, but questions that will be answered at the Eclipse Modeling Days which will be held in New York and Toronto in November.
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Xtext @ Google
Last week I had the chance to speak at the EclipseDay at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, CA, an event organized by the Eclipse Foundation and hosted by Google's Open Source Programs Office. Google is a truly amazing company and the GooglePlex is a very exciting place to be at. As I was one day early and needed a creative place to put finishing touches on my slides, I took the chance to visit Robert Konigsberg who was kind enough to host me for that day. The organizers put together a great agenda with lots of interesting talks. Looking at the agenda, you will see that there actually are three major topics, Eclipse in the Enterprise, Modeling and Runtime: The talks
- Eclipse in the Enterprise: Lessons from Google
- Distributed OSGi
- Deploying Successful Enterprise Tools
- Build and Provision
all dealt with how Eclipse can be used in the Enterprise or which challenges you will face if you start using Eclipse in large-scale scenarios.
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Eclipse Modeling Day in North America
We (i.e. the Eclipse Foundation, itemis and Cloudsmith) are looking into arranging one more Eclipse Modeling Day in North America this fall and would like to gather feedback from folks interested in attending. Please use this poll to help us tailor a location and program to suit your particular interests:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dF ZQcGh3RDhrUUdyNTAtMXlVU2pKQ1E6MA..
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Getting started with Xtext, part 2
Last week, I showed you how easy it is to create a DSL with Xtext. In this installment, we will have a look at how to leverage the models created with the DSL.
Goal
Let's imagine we want to create an application for orders. People can sign in to the system, place orders for various items, check out and have them sent to their address. Very simple, but we can show a lot of things here.
As we expect to be writing more than one application of this type and as we also would like to be able to express the structure of the application on a business level (one of the major drivers for DSLs and MDSD for that matter), we come up with the idea of using a DSL to describe what the application does. Defining the DSL is what we did last week. This week, we need to map the concepts of the DSL to some code and some APIs we're going to program against.
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Getting Started with Xtext
Xtext has been released as a part of the Eclipse Galileo release train on June 24th, 2009. Xtext is a framework for building DLSs (domain specific languages). In fact, it can be seen as a DSL for defining DSLs.
In this article, we will develop a small DSL for defining entities.
Download and Install
Hop over to http://xtext.itemis.com and download an Xtext distribution matching your platform. We've got all major platforms: Windows, Mac OSX Carbon, Mac OSX Cocoa 64, Mac OSX Cocoa 32, Linux Gtk 64, Linux Gtk 32.
To install, unzip the distribution file to a directory of your liking.
Windows users, please make sure you unzip to a directory near to your filesystem root! Eclipse contains files and folders with long names that might be hard to handle for Windows.
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