Next generation textual DSLs with Xtext

Sven Efftinge (itemis AG), Jan Koehnlein (itemis AG)

Frameworks - Modeling · Long - one hour
Tuesday, 13:30, 50 minutes | Great America Meeting Room 3

Sven Efftinge

Jan Koehnlein

Xtext is a framework for developing textual domain-specific languages (DSL). Given an EBNF-like grammar, Xtext automatically generates an Ecore metamodel, a rich-featured, fully configurable DSL-editor, and the skeleton of a code generator based on Xpand. Xtext is a component in the Modeling/TMF subproject, and it is planned to be part of Eclipse Galileo. In this demo, we explain the core concepts of the Xtext such as language inheritance, metamodel import, metamodel generation and validation. We also demonstrate the generated editor's features like code completion, syntax highlighting, navigation, and folding, and show how the user can override the default functionality. Finally, we feed an exemplary code generator with the models created using the editor, thereby demonstrating Xtext's capability for agile domain-driven development.

Sven Efftinge works as consultant, coach and developer and leads a lab of itemis AG in Kiel, Germany. His focus is on domain-specific modelling, generator development and Eclipse technologies - Sven has developed the languages and core of openArchitectureWare 4 as well as the Xtext framework. Always looking for new technologies and concepts which help reducing complexity in enterprise software systems, he can help looking through the maze of the latest hypes. Sven is also a speaker on software conferences, co-author of a book and writes articles for magazines.

After achieving his PhD, Jan Köhnlein worked as a Software Architect at Gentleware in Hamburg (Germany), where he advanced the development of Poseidon For UML and became product manager of Apollo for Eclipse. Furthermore, he acted as a consultant and coach in the area of model-driven development on the Eclipse platform in various projects and workshops. In 2008 he joined the itemis labs in Kiel Germany. He is a committer for the Eclipse projects TMF, EMFT, M2T as well as for oAW.