Sven Efftinge's Blog: Xtext M7

Monday, May 11, 2009

Xtext M7 - New & Noteworthy

Last week was the last milestone (M7) for this year's release train (Galileo). We're pretty happy with the result. It's in a much better shape than what was available after M6 as we cleaned up a number of things and fixed many bugs.

Besides that Xtext now supports lazy linking, the content assist framework has been overhauled and finally is in a shape we're very happy with. In addition M7 enables template proposals (including corresponding preference page) for all languages without the need for any extra programming or configuration. Also the preference page for syntax coloring now works as expected.
Finally we made some progress regarding the EMF Index.

See the New & Noteworthy document for the whole list of changes in M7.

Xtext now contains all features and concepts we wanted it to have in the final release.
There will be five release candidates (RC) before the final build will be made available:

RC1	05/19/2009
RC2	05/26/2009
RC3	06/02/2009
RC4	06/09/2009
RC5	06/16/2009
0.7.0	06/28/2009

We'll spend the next weeks on improving the overall user experience. This includes things like

Documentation
Website
Wizards
UI polishing
minor code clean ups
Bug fixing

In order to allow you helping us ;-), we've prepared a set of Galileo M7 distros containing everything necessary to get started with Xtext. The zips can be downloaded from itemis' website:

Any feedback is as always highly appreciated. Have fun!

6 Kommentare:

Scott Stanchfield said...: Wow - color me impressed! I was working on a DSL and decided to give this a try. Very nice, indeed! (When I think of what I was doing before in my content assist by hand!); 5/12/09 3:12 PM
betto said...: the downloads are not available anymore, are they?; 6/9/09 3:14 PM
Sven Efftinge said...: @betto No the M7 builds are no longer available. But there are downloads for the current Release Candidate.
Go to http://oaw.itemis.com -> downloads.; 6/9/09 3:41 PM
betto said...: I'm afraid they still point to
http://xtext.itemis.com/distros/eclipse-SDK-3.5RC3-xtext-0.7RC3-linux-gtk.tar.gz
and xtext.itemis.com always responds with an error...; 6/9/09 3:44 PM
Sven Efftinge said...: Yes, we are ware of that. It will be fixed ASAP.
In the meantime the distros can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.itemis.de/xtext/distros/; 6/10/09 1:02 PM
Anonymous said...: Right-clicking on the xtext editor never produces the "Generate Xtext Artifacts" menu item shown in the tutorial. Spent some hours trying to get the tutorial project to generate, and have given up.; 4/7/10 4:12 AM