JetBrains MPS Blog

Are you coming to Code Generation 2013? The JetBrains MPS and YouTrack teams are sending a four member crew this year. We’ll present MPS 3.0, teach the basics of projectional editing and practice language extension during the MPS hands-on session on Wednesday April 10th. On Thursday 11th during the Have Your Language Built While You Wait session, we’ll be available to help you start prototyping your own language. You’ll also be able to grab us for a chat any time at the JetBrains booth down in the lobby and discuss whatever comes to mind related to DSLs, MPS and life. See you there!

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

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 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

Here’s the news:
Listening to your requests we wrote down a plan for future MPS releases. It took us a while to clarify and prioritize the major important tasks ahead and I think the outcome is pretty promising.
Why not check it out right away at
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/MPS/MPS+public+roadmap

We’re going to stick to the roadmap for our further development. The map is not set in stone, however, so feel free to comment, discuss and vote for issues in the tracker to help us steer the projects towards your needs.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

It seems we rushed 2.0.5 a bit and a nasty bug sneaked in accidentaly. This one really needed to be eliminated urgently. Please, find the fixed 2.0.6 release ready for download. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you want to see the offending bug, check out the release notes.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

Another doze of bugfixes has been packaged and released. MPS 2.0.5 is now available for download. You may also be interested in checking out the release notes. Have a lot of fun!

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

On Feb 12-13, I was taking part in DSL Workshop by SAP in Walldorf, Germany. Walldorf is a small town 150km away from Frankfurt am Main, with population of about 15000, mostly SAP employees. I spoke on MPS there.

On the first day, presentations on different DSL technologies were scheduled, my speech on MPS among them. I had initially planned to speak for about 20 minutes but it has taken about an hour. People were asking a lot of questions about MPS, especially about our editor. They were surprised when they saw how similar our editor is to conventional text editors even though we edit syntax tree directly. The ability to create and extend languages which is a unique feature of MPS has also drawn a lot of attention. Overall, I believe it was a really successful appearance

Of course, there were lots of other presentations, most notably those on Stratego/XT, WebDSL, SAP DSL Infrastructure, XText, Mod4j (which isn’t available yet) and other interesting stuff. Stratego/XT is a platform for text-based languages developed by Eelco Visser, among others. WebDSL is a set of DSLs for web application development. SAP DSL infrastructure is developed by SAP in order to create DSLs for use in their own products. XText is another product that supports development of text-based languages. In addition to language definition, it provides an Eclipse-based editor and integrates with Eclipse-based modeling framework. Mod4j is a set of tools that simplify JEE development using DSLs. On the second day, we discussed architectural options and tradeoffs that should be decided upon when designing a new DSL infrastructure.

I would definitely like to thank SAP AG for arranging this excellent workshop and making it possible for me to make an appearance. Special thanks go to individual participants of the workshop: Axel Uhl (SAP), Bernd Kold (SAP), Thomas Goldschmidt (SAP), Markus Voelter (Itemis), Lennart Kats (TU Delft), Eelco Visser (TU Delft), and Jos Warmer (Ordina).

You can take a look at pictures that I’ve taken during this workshop.

Posted by Konstantin Solomatov, Lead MPS developer