Galileo Freshman Project #1: Xtext

this year we have 10 new projects joining the galileo release train.  i thought it might be interesting to highlight some of these new projects in a quick q&a with the project leaders.

the first project is xtext , a project in the eclipse modeling project.  sven efftinge is the project leader. btw, check-out xtext’s new user friendly web site .

what does your project do?

xtext makes development of programming languages as well as domain specific languages (dsls) very easy. one can think of a dsl as a very simple programming interfaces (api) which is tailored to solve a particular problem and therefore can significantly reduce the amount of code to be written.

who are your typical users?

xtext is usually used by software developers. the outcome (the dsls) might also be used by others.

why did you join the galileo release train?

we joined galileo because it’s *the eclipse release*. and it makes consuming any projects which are on the simultaneous release very easy.

after completing your first release train, what do you think now?

i’m glad we’re almost done, to be honest but all the work was worth the effort and we would join again.

what future enhancements are you planning for your project?

the galileo release of xtext serves as a solid basis for future enhancements. now that this basis is there, we see so many low hanging fruits in the ide like rename refactoring or quick fixes, which urgently need to be added. on the other hand we want to come up with a common base language which can be extended and allows for  reusing common parts of programming languages like e.g. expressions. so people won’t need to re-implement the common and well understood bits of programming languages.

from http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com