Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to implement a simple DSL with Xtext and you saw that, starting from a grammar definition, Xtext automatically generates many artifacts for the DSL, including IDE tooling.

You also started to learn the EMF API that allows you to programmatically manipulate a model representing a program AST. Being able to programmatically access models is crucial to perform additional checks on a program that has been parsed and also to perform code generation, as we will see in the rest of the book.

In the next chapter, we will introduce the new programming language, Xtend (which is shipped with Xtext, and is implemented in Xtext itself): a Java-like general purpose programming language tightly integrated with Java that allows you to write much simpler and much cleaner programs. We will use Xtend in the rest of the book to implement all the aspects of languages implemented in Xtext.