JetBrains MPS Blog

While playing with the 3.0 EAP releases, you may consider checking out the updated MPS generator tutorial. It has undergone a major rewrite to accommodate for all the recent changes to the MPS generator and to better serve the purpose of teaching the various code generation techniques that MPS offers. The bundled generator_demo sample project, which you find in the MPS 3.0 EAP distro, has been updated, too.

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

The JetBrains TV site now hosts two new introductory screen-casts loaded with practical tips and tricks that aim to help people start using MPS effectively. While the first demo describes how to work with the MPS editor, the second one illustrates ways to run your solutions either from within MPS or integrated into a Java solution. If you are an MPS freshman and want to get useful tips, check them out.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

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