JetBrains MPS Blog

Most of the readers of this blog can ride MPS already. Newcomers, however, need guidance and help to overcome the initial barrier so that they could start using the tool and benefit from it. We’re constantly trying to come up with ways that would improve the initial experience and just recently we published a short step-by-step tutorial - Fast Track to MPS - 9 steps to mastery. The tutorial aims at newbies and guides them to walk steadily from simple concepts towards the more involved ones so that they gradually build the necessary knowledge.

If you know of anyone, who might be willing to give MPS a try, please consider helping them start by pointing them to the new tutorial.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

Here’s the news that you have been waiting for - 2.5.4 is out. (If you were actually waiting for news about 3.0, please read on). Grab 2.5.4 while it’s fresh. The release notes will give you full details on what’s changed.

Except for the usual doze of bug-fixes, 2.5.4 comes with one major new feature that is definitely worth your attention:

• the ability for build scripts to rebuild an MPS project from scratch.

Without the need to regenerate in the MPS workbench or to keep your generated code in VCS, you just invoke ant generate on the command line and your whole MPS project gets regenerated, compiled and packaged. What a relieve!

There’s a catch, though. In order for the rebuild to be possible, your project must not contain bootstrapping dependencies, e.g. a module must not use a language, which requires that same module for generation. Chasing such dependency violations and hunting them down can be a challenge without proper tools. To give you a hand, the Dependency Analyzer has been enhanced and we documented the required steps on a dedicated how-to page that will give you all relevant information and guide you through the process.

As a bonus, once you remove all bootstrapping dependencies from your projects, you’ll be in a good position to migrate them automatically to MPS 3.0 eventually.

Speaking of MPS 3.0 …

Yeah, we’ve slipped behind schedule with 3.0. The 3.0 codebase has undergone a major facelift. We’ve refactored the core API so that MPS will provide stable and robust set of well documented APIs to allow access to the models directly from your code. It will also help us evolve MPS faster. The price we pay now will certainly pay off in the near future.

The features mentioned in the (updated) roadmap for 3.0 are gradually being added and we are coming close to a point when the 3.0 EAP will open. Just give us a few more weeks, please.
You’ll soon be able to put your hands on

• Multiple editors per concept
• Tight IntelliJ IDEA integration
• Smoother BaseLanguage editor

and many other improvements.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

Here we have another improvement on MPS. Shortly before the 3.0 version becomes ready for EAP, we decided to publish all the bug fixes that have accumulated since the latest release and prepared a 2.5.3 release for you to enjoy.

Apart from the fixed bugs, we’ve made the IntelliJ IDEA MPS plugin compatible with IDEA 12.

As usual, you can also check out the fixed issues in the tracker to see what exactly there is for you.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

The Building Your Own Java with MPS tutorial session that Václav Pech and Alex Shatalin presented at CodeGeneration 2012 is available on-line on the InfoQ site. You may check out part 1 and part 2 to familiarize yourself with the fundamental principles of MPS.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

Some good news for those, who reported bugs in MPS recently - a bugfix release 2.5.2 has just been made available.
The MPS plugin for IntelliJ IDEA has also been updated and put into the IDEA Plugins update site.

If you are curious about what we’ve been working on, you can check out the fixed issues.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

We are happy to announce that the first bugfix release for MPS 2.5 is published on the download page.

You can review the list of fixed issues and download the updated MPS plugin for IntelliJ IDEA from IDEA Plugins update site now. Stay up to date!

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

Here we come with the third release candidate. Since things look smooth we are likely to go final now.
The release candidate 3 of MPS 2.5 is available at the usual download page.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

Good command of the tools is undoubtedly one of the attributes of an efficient developer. MPS 2.5 can monitor your actions and give you statistics on how frequently you use its most prominent editing and refactoring capabilities. Go to Help | Productivity Guide to see how well you do:

Productivity Guide

Additionaly, we’ve prepared a list of a couple dozen tricks you could learn through the Tip of the Day window to become more fluent with the MPS editor:

Tip of the Day

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

InfoQ has interviewed Alexander Shatalin and Václav Pech about MPS, its fundamentals, applicability as well as a few other things during CodeGeneration 2012. You can check it out at the InfoQ site.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

The good news for today is: JetBrains MPS 2.5 is round the corner. All the major building blocks are in place and we’ve just entered a 3 - 4 week period of final tuning and polishing. We offer a hot-off-the-oven EAP build for you to play with in the meantime. Within less than a month from now the final release should be ready for you to download.

Here are a few tips on what to especially look for if you want to take the the EAP build for a test ride:

• The IDEA plugin, which let’s you run MPS languages in IntelliJ IDEA
• The new build language allowing you to automate the process of building your projects
• Dependency Analyzer and Module Dependency Checker/Tool
• Changes in the refactoring language
• Suppressing warnings and errors

A full (a bit raw) list of the already finished new features is to be found here.

If you hit a problem in the EAP build, shout out. Fixing the problems you discover in the EAP version is our current main priority.
With your help we are in for a great release!

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team