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by dion.
Original Post: JetBrains Programming System (MTS, or DSL)
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The Code Generation Network interviewed the CEO of JetBrains (Sergey Dmitriev).
Of course, many things were discussed, including IDEA and Fabrique.
What is really interesting is the part on their Meta Programming System:
With this system you can quickly develop the syntax structure, an editor and a code generator for custom domain specific languages.
This is the Domain Specific Language game that Microsoft is playing at the moment.
It isn't about UML or MDA:
CGN: Is this in UML? What is the visual language?
Sergey: The visual language is not one language. It's not an MDA-like program. We have two main parts that are public. One describes the business model, similar to an entity relationship diagram. But it's not about this, it's about business objects. It's a diagram editor because that's a convenient way to represent such models. And we also have editors for queries to the database, but again, not in UML.
We also can discover a database, and talk to web services or to session beans. However, we describe these things on a more abstract level. We don't push the user to use a concrete run-time platform, like J2EE, .NET, Web services, and so forth. You don't need to choose this at an early stage.
This is a domain specific language for this domain, which is data access plus a web user-interface. So for the moment it's just for web applications. But in the future we will also do client side applications. For each domain we will have a special language. Then we generate for a particular computer language. Right now that means we generate Java and J2EE. In the future we will add .NET and others.
When you use a more high-level description, you have less dependence on the target platform.
Our domain specific language for web pages is based on XHTML, and we have a set of web controls that are expressed in our own language.
It is interesting to see similar DSL talk from various parts of the tech sector.
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