Over the last weeks I've been polishing a language for a client. As I mentioned before on this blog, I decided to use Xtext(www.eclipse.org/Xtext/) to build the toolset for the language. The language deliverables consists of:

• An abstract syntax in EMF
• A concrete syntax (in ANTLR originally, now in Xtext)
• An Eclipse-based editor (textual)
• A Model-2-Text (M2T) transformer that converts the input into Java code

This project has turned out to be a near perfect fit with Xtext. An for the first time in a long while, I'm very impressed. The Xtext team has done a fantastic job building a pragmatic toolset for building textual DSLs.

I did a similar language earlier for another client based on Microsoft's Oslo SDK. I was very impressed then too, but I actually think that open-source has managed to pull off a better (or at least as good) tool as that of M. Impressive!

In the process of learning Xtext, I did run into a few issues that with the help from google and the Xtext team I was able to resolve. In the next posts, I'll try to outline these issues and maybe also write a simple tutorial that highlights the issues I ran into.