CodeGeneration 2008

I am currently attending the CodeGeneration 2008 conference at Cambridge (UK).

It is very inspiring to meet so many people involved in model-driven software development. Many of them come from the Microsoft DSL tools world which apparently has not evolved a lot in the recent past. People show a lot of interest in oAW and Eclipse Modeling techniques.

Yesterday we had a very vivid gold fish bowl discussion on the evolution of DSLs. Many of the emerging problems seem to be resolvable by better tooling. That just convinced me that we are working on the right topics in the current development of Xtext and oAW5.

Well, of course there are still a bunch of people around promoting MDA with all the UML and OMG stuff. It appears to me that simple things have a tendency to become rather complicated with that approach.

Looking forward to our hands on workshop on Eclipse Modeling tools tomorrow.

New Article on Textual DSLs with EMP

Peter, Sven and me, we have composed an Eclipse article on how to create your own textual DSL using tools from the Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP). It covers the definition of a grammar using Xtext, generating, running and customizing the DSL editor, adding constraints with Check and generating code with Xpand. You can find it here.

We are convinced that the described approach one of the most pragmatic ways of designing DSLs and implement code generators. If you have just a little bit of experience with the described technologies, creating your own external DSL becomes nearly as natural as writing Java code.