Xtext

Eclipse Xtext is a mature and powerful framework for building domain specific languages - standalone, backed by a language server (LSP) and with an Eclipse IDE. Despite the existing documentation, tutorials and tons of third party material, there are some problems and obstacles new Xtext users are stumbling over regularly and ask in the Xtext forums or on Stackoverflow. In this talk I will give an overview on some of the most common issues and show possible solutions.

Defining DSLs in the Eclipse universe has become almost a normal thing and there are incredible frameworks out there to do that. Some of them are textual, others are graphical and from time to time there comes a flood of different attempts to mix both notations. The story of mixed notations is old, yet still not  solved in a common way that has proven to be “the solution”. Of course there are plenty of interesting technical challenges, but let’s step back and rethink who is our target audience to see if we are solving a real problem.

Code formatting is an opinionated beast. It always has been a matter of taste, and it always will be a matter of taste. This is the reason, why professional formatting tools, such as Eclipse JDT, offer a gazillion number of options. Which is still not sufficient enough. After all, you can override them inline with tag-comments to make the formatter shut up. Can't we do better than that? What if we could use machine learning techniques to detect the preferred code style that was used in a codebase so far? Turned out, we can.

With its history of 10 years passionate software engineering, dozens of contributors and millions of lines of source code, Xtext has become the de facto standard for the development of sophisticated domain specific languages in the Eclipse ecosystem and beyond. The release of Xtext 2.14 is still hot and yet Xtext 2.15 is already keeping us busy. Time to reflect on the recently introduced features and time to look forward and talk about the things to come.

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are a powerful tool to capture arbitrary abstractions of an application domain and map it to code. Eclipse really shines when it comes to integrating DSLs in rich-client workbenches, but how about web-based IDEs?

In this talk you will learn how to bundle the power of four Eclipse frameworks to build a cloud-based IDE with support for your own DSLs:

GEF 5.0.100 has been released with Eclipse Photon to provide an improved version of the GEF DOT authoring environment (while keeping the other GEF components stable).

Both textual and graphical modeling have their well-known strengths and weaknesses – obviously, we want the best of both worlds!

Enter Xtext/Sirius Integration: This talks includes a live demo of Xtext editors used as direct editors in Sirius diagrams and in the Properties view. We can both edit elements of the same model as used for the diagram, or edit text attribute contents.
Furthermore, this talk looks at some of the integration challenges and how to (mostly) overcome them.