Finally, I have finished editing the whitepaper on various debugging techniques in JetBrains MPS. Thanks go out to Sergej Koščejev for contributing to this whitepaper. You should also check out his complementary post at specificlanguages.com.
Like most programs, MPS writes messages to a log file — lots of messages. To make sense of so many messages, it helps to use a tool that improves the visual presentation, for example: grid display: separate fields and align them nicely, like timestamp, logger, message color coding for message severity, like bright red for … Read more
The com.dslfoundry.plaintextgen extension (https://jetbrains.github.io/MPS-extensions/extensions/plaintext-gen/) for JetBrains MPS (https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/) enables a language designer to write model-to-text generation templates in pretty much the same way one writes model-to-model transformations in MPS. This is very useful for many reasons, the most prominent two of which are in my opinion: you don’t have or don’t want to build a … Read more
Often times, when creating a new language, I skip the “Create Sandbox Solution” checkbox. Recently, I have learned that the sandboxes are actually not just solutions with the name sandbox. Because of their property of actually residing in the language folder itself, many MPS Extensions are actually using sandboxes to package example models with a … Read more
MPS comes with pretty good default settings, but there are some settings that I really like to change as soon as I have a fresh MPS IDE in front of my nose. Below is a description of such settings. Hide empty aspect tabs By default, MPS always shows all tabs for all aspects (also aspects … Read more
Today, I released a first version of my slides explaining JetBrains MPS generators, including useful generator patterns: https://github.com/eugenschindler/mps-teaching/blob/master/JetBrains-MPS-generators.pdf Use it to your advantage!
Today, I am going to lead you through a tutorial of how to build a graphical (slightly UML-like) editor for the structure of an MPS language. The main goal of this tutorial is to show you how to use the diagram editor and querylist plugins that have been developed by Itemis as part of the mbeddr … Read more
Imagine you have a (very contrived) language as shown below (i.e. some root that contains children of an abstract concept named A and Bs and Cs extend A): By default, all As and Bs can be substituted (Ctrl/Cmd+Space) in the nlist of MyRoot: Now, if we want to restrict this, to, let’s say, only Bs, … Read more
Between MPS major versions, the MPS global caches are nicely separated (e.g. for MPS 2017.1, the cache directory is $HOME/.MPS2017.1 and for MPS 2017.2, the cache directory is $HOME/.MPS2017.2, where $HOME is your home directory, e.g. C:\Users\<yourusername> on Windows or /home/<yourusername> on Linux). Sometimes, there are reasons why you would want to change the cache … Read more
The mbeddr RCP is great, because it gives you a focused MPS-based IDE, including mbeddr.platform, which you can use to write models in the embedded software domain. However, I find it often useful to have the mbeddr.platform plugins (which are generic pieces of functionality useful for any DSL development) available for development as a language … Read more