Eclipse Modeling Project: A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit (Eclipse Series)

Eclipse Modeling Project: A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit (Eclipse Series)
Authors
Richard C. Gronback
ISBN
0321534077
Published
16 Mar 2009
Purchase online
amazon.com

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

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Customer Reviews

Midwest Book Review said
ECLIPSE MODELING PROJECT: ACHIEVE BREAKTHROUGH PRODUCTIVITY AND QUALITY WITH MDD AND ECLIPSE-BASED DSLS is for any Java programming library strong in domain-specific languages and software engineering guides. It covers the benefits of a model-based approach and surveys the Eclipse Modeling Project's ability to create new DSLs. An outstanding survey evolves in a technical title recommended for any advanced computer collection.

W Boudville said
If you use Eclipse, you probably know it as a neat Integrated Development Environment for java, where perhaps you manually write all the java code. This book shows a different take on Eclipse; a much higher level of sophistication. Basically, it shows how to go from a diagram of a set of related classes to autogenerated java code. Developers have put a massive amount of effort into fleshing out this ability; something well documented by the book.

The starting diagram is a domain model. It models a scenario that you are interested in. You might think that an alternative approach is to use Backus Naur Formalism to define the same information. But the book deprecates BNF. Decades-long experience with BNF suggests that it lacks expressive power, and that perhaps the pure text nature of a BNF instantiation is too hard to grasp relationships between objects. Instead, the expression of a domain model in terms of what is roughly [or exactly] a UML diagram gives visuals that people can far more easily absorb.

What the book has is a set of very detailed tutorials. Each walks through a given example model. Fleshing out how to use Eclipse to make the model. Initially, the book's narrative is at a very abstract level, which may hard for some to follow. But the tutorials help give this substance. Each tutorial is non-trivial, and shows how Eclipse has extensive abilities to help you.

In terms of autogeneration, it's not just java code. The book gives examples of autogenerated XML, and in general we see the use of Model to Text transformation templates that spit out text files. One common feature of all of these is the sheer verbosity of the the textual output. Autogeneration saves you labour and reduces the occurrence of simple bugs. Thus Eclipse lets you work as much as possible at a diagrammatic level, which can be more productive.

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