EclipseCon is just about to start and I am glad that I can make it this year. I have the chance to present Project Spray on thursday (Nov 3rd, 11:30 AM Bürgersaal 2) together with Jos Warmer. Spray aims to provide tooling to facilitate the creation of visual editors based on the Graphiti framework by the use of Xtext based DSL and Xtend code generator. You can basically compare it with what GMF Tools does for GMF, just with a DSL based approach.
The project was founded at this year’s Code Generation conference, and Jos contributed an initial state of Spray derived from a customer’s project back in August. Since then the project team refactored the code base quite a bit. We are still in an early project phase. Most of the development is done in spare time yet, like Open Source projects often start. That was quite tough besides my full packed work schedule. Many hours on train or evenings in the hotel were spent to push this project.
At the moment I am just about to release version 0.3.0 of the Spray SDK, which I will use for our demo on thursday. Of course we want to gain a large audience. I am honest enough to say that attendees won’t see a production ready tool yet, but of course it is in working state. Jan announced a pie fight for visual tooling, I am ready to open my mouth wide enough to catch the incoming pies.
For our session we don’t want to start any discussion on graphical editing vs. visualization, whether GMF is better than Graphiti, or DSL / code generation vs. framework approach. There is always a niche for everything, and we are confident that Spray fills one of these gaps.
Besides what an end user actually can do with Spray at this moment there are quite some hidden gems in the project. I am using Spray to have also a non-trivial example for Eclipse Modeling tooling. You will find, for example
- a Maven Tycho based build for Xtext 2 based projects
- SWTBot based UI tests, integrated in the Maven build
- a project wizard with Xtend based code generation
- an advanced example use of Xbase in a DSL
- documentation based on WikiText, integrated in the build
- unit testing of the Xtext DSL with xtext-utils unittesting
- separation of the Xtend code generator from the language project
At EclipseCon I will take the chance to exchange with some experts in the fields of Modeling, especially Xtext and Graphiti. I will lay another focus on Build systems, especially Maven. Besides that there are many other interesting talks, far more than I can attend. And not to forget to meet all the other Eclipse enthusiasts. See you there!
