Xtext tutorials
The two Xtext tutorials are stand-alone tutorials. You do not need to do the Xtext I tutorial in order to perform the Xtext II tutorial. Ask your supervisor which tutorial suits you best.
This tutorial presents the Xtext framework, a toolsuite for the generation of plain text based model editors. Such textual editors provide syntax highlighting, content assist (ctrl-space), an outline, and much more out-of-the-box. You will start by creating a textual syntax for Turing Machines.
Preliminaries
There's a few things to do before we dive into the tutorial itself.
Required Software
For this tutorial, we need you to have Eclipse installed:
- Install Eclipse. For what we do, we recommend installing the Eclipse Modeling Tools, with a few extras. Our Wiki page on getting Eclipse has the details: simply follow the instructions for downloading and installing Eclipse and you should be set.
- Open your eclipse instance and install the complete Xtext SDK 2.7.3 from the itemis updatesite: http://download.itemis.de/updates/
Recommended Tutorials
We recommend that you have completed the following tutorials before diving into this one.
- Eclipse Plug-ins and Extension Points
- Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)
- This tutorial needs the turingmachine.ecore and the controller you've implemented in the EMF tutorial. If you did not complete the EMF tutorial, you may download a working turing machine here... (in the future).
Creating a Grammar
An Xtext grammar is always related to a specific EMF meta model. The grammar defines a concrete syntax in which instances of the meta model (the abstract syntax) can be serialized and stored. Xtext supports two ways of linking a grammar with a meta model: either creating a grammar for an existing meta model, or creating a grammar first and generating a meta model out of it. Here we will use the former approach, reusing the meta model for Turing Machines that you already defined earlier.