JetBrains MPS Blog

It’s been almost 3 months since the first Beta of Meta Programming System. Since then we have received a good amount of feedback and a lot has been done to improve MPS.

MPS Beta 2 is now available introducing the following major changes:

• Automatic generator generation. MPS tracks whether the required generator is up to date and generates it automatically, if not, before the model that uses this language is generated.
• Easier language generation. When a model that uses a language is being edited, an note will appear in the editor reminding to generate the language and providing one-click option to start generation.
  
• Smart complete. The code completion (available with Ctrl+Shift+Space) became even smarter: it filters out actions according to the type of the result.
• Faster “find usages”. The usages search speed improved by using the persistent caches.
• Faster “go to root node” action. We use persistent caches in order to make the “go to root node” action work faster.
• Better search in editor. We have FireFox-like search in the editor.
  
• Other usability, performance improvements and bugfixes.

You are welcome to download MPS Beta 2, try it and let us know your feedback.

It is a very exciting moment for us because we just released Beta version of MPS. Based on all the feedback on the Beta we plan to release MPS 1.0 in early 2009.

MPS is quite different from what we’ve all known before so, in order to ease the learning curve of MPS for new users, we’ve created a Tutorial. In this tutorial we create a simple language for programmer’s income calculator according to different development rates.

In the end it generates a Java Swing application. The tutorial covers a wide range of topics, and completing it will teach you how to create non-trivial languages in MPS. It teaches defining a language syntax, editor, generator, constraints and typesystem. It also demonstrates an important feature of MPS — language extension.

We are still working on improving the tutorial, but we think it’s already quite useful to get familiar with main MPS’ concepts and techniques.

Even though completing the tutorial takes a significant amount of effort and time: about 2 hours, you will be rewarded with the skills needed to create real languages in MPS. If you have any thoughts about improving this tutorial or have questions about it or MPS, feel free to post your comments here or to our discussion forum.

-JetBrains MPS Team