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itemis pushes Eclipse Modeling ahead

Redevelopment of »Xtext« and »Xpand«

08/20/2008, Lünen

Abstract

itemis AG, a leading IT service provider for model-driven software development (MDSD) and strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, is successfully deploying its expertise on the current Eclipse Modeling Project (EMP). A team of itemis developers, put together especially for the EMP, is pushing ahead the development and promotion of model-driven technologies in a focused manner, with the result that significant advances are already being seen in the development of the open source framework »Xtext« and the template language »Xpand«. These will be integrated into the next release of Eclipse.

The »Xtext« framework is used to develop textual domain-specific languages (DSL) and for each language offers customised integration into the development environment. This environment completely matches the popular Java development environments in terms of functionality. With the new version of »Xtext«, it is now possible to implement more complex languages, right through to entire programming languages, with ease. A language inheritance mechanism facilitates the reutilisation of popular language modules. During development, particular focus is being paid to scalability and performance.

»Xpand« is a typified template language that features concepts that are especially important for code generation and thus facilitates the translation of any domain-specific languages into known programming languages. »Xpand« allows templates to be called up polymorphically and expanded or hidden through aspects.

Both »Xpand« and »Xtext« itself are implemented with »Xtext«. This ensures that the concepts integrated into »Xtext« are also truly relevant to practical situations and offer superlative quality.

»The development of a framework for creating programming languages at first seems very ambitious. But we’ve already overcome the biggest challenges and we’re right on schedule. Both 'Xtext' and 'Xpand' will be included in the next version of Eclipse, which ships in the summer of 2009,« says Sven Efftinge, head of the development team.

»The challenges faced during the development of large-scale individual software systems nowadays lie more and more in the handling of growing complexity. It is only with suitable programming tools that we are able to find good answers to the problems posed. The tremendous global interest from all manner of industries (automotive, aviation, telecommunications) in Eclipse Modeling is proof positive that we are on the right path with our open source approach to development,« says Wolfgang Neuhaus, Director and co-founder of itemis AG.

About Eclipse Foundation

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform.
The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects. Full details of Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation are available at www.eclipse.org.