Martin @ Blog

Last week, Sun Microsystems introduced a new version of their Integrated Development Envorinment NetBeans. Version 6.5 introduces a lot of intresting new features and got a lot of attention in the media. Since the rise of Eclipse, NetBeans was somewhat ignored by many developers or at least by the ones I know (including myself). In order to get more knowledge about it, I decided to try it and test if it was suitable for a project I am currently working on. (more…)

Tonight, I attended a lecture of Markus Völter (also founder of Software Engineering Radio, which I can recommend to listen to) about Domain Specific Languages. The lecture, organized by Sioux in ther ‘hot-or-not’ series, was quite interesting. He started with an introduction on what DSL’s are and what they are not (fluent API’s or ontologies are not DSL’s according to Völter). He continued with discussing various ways to implement DSL’s including using Ruby by implementing a DSL using the dynamic features of this language and Scala using a similar technique. In the second part he gave a demonstration with XText in Eclipse, which was very impressive. In only five minutes, he developed a text DSL for describing the states of a microwave, and generated a plugin for Eclipse for this DSL, including syntax highlighting and code completion.
Another demonstration involved JetBrains MPS.
All in all it was a interesting lecture, but sometimes it was a bit difficult to follow, especially since I’m not very experienced with DSL’s.

De iPhone als fluit: