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Achieve Breakthrough Productivity and Quality with MDD and Eclipse-based DSLs

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and model-driven development (MDD) offer software engineers powerful new ways to improve productivity, enhance quality, and insulate systems from rapid technological change. Now, there’s a pragmatic, start-to-finish guide to creating DSLs and using MDD techniques with the powerful open source Eclipse platform. In Eclipse Modeling Project, Richard C. Gronback illuminates both the principles and techniques software professionals need to master, offering insights that will be invaluable to developers working with any tool or platform.

As co-leader of the Eclipse Modeling Project, Gronback is singularly well-positioned to demonstrate DSLs and MDD at work in Eclipse. Gronback systematically introduces each of the Eclipse technologies that can be used in DSL and MDD development. Throughout, he introduces key concepts and technologies in the context of a start-to-finish worked example and presents new best practices and never-before published techniques. He also covers Eclipse projects discussed in no other book, including Query/View/Transformation (QVT) and the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)–a project the author personally leads.

Eclipse Modeling Project gives software practitioners all the knowledge they need to explore the remarkable potential of DSLs and MDD–and to start using them in real-world projects.

• Why a model-based approach enables the rapid customization of high-quality solutions within the product line paradigm
• How the Eclipse Modeling Project’s capabilities can be used to efficiently create new DSLs
• Powerful techniques for developing DSL abstract syntax, graphical notation, and textual syntax
• How to build Model-to-Model (M2M) and Model-to-Text (M2T) transformations–including a powerful new M2M solution based on Eclipse QVT
• Efficiently packaging and deploying DSLs with Eclipse
• Complete reference sections for the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF); GMF runtime and tooling; QVT Operational Mapping Language (OML); Xpand, and more

Foreword

Preface

Part I: Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Modeling Project as a DSL Toolkit

Part II: Developing Domain-Specific Languages

Chapter 3: Developing a DSL Abstract Syntax

Chapter 4: Developing a DSL Graphical Notation

Chapter 5: Developing a DSL Textual Syntax

Chapter 6: Developing Model-to-Model Transformations

Chapter 7: Developing Model-to-Text Transformations

Chapter 8: DSL Packaging and Deployment

Part III: Reference

Chapter 9: Graphical Editing Framework (GEF)

Chapter 10: GMF Runtime

Chapter 11: GMF