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!
The mps-plaintextgen plugin has been upgraded with new functionality for fine-grained control of whitespaces. Such functionality is very useful for languages that are fiddly with whitespace such as reStructuredText or where you just want to have very fine control (such as in JSON or in some instances Python). Plaintextflow is part of the plaintextgen plugin, … Read more
For many purposes of end-users and language engineers , the standard MPS mechanism with tooltips and Event Log is sufficient: However, in some cases more information is needed. This is where the MPS log files come into play. There are two ways to reach this log: You can use Help –> Show Log in Explorer … Read more
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