DSLs in Action

Chapter 7. External DSL implementation artifacts

This chapter covers

• The processing pipeline of an external DSL
• Parser classification
• Developing an external DSL using ANTLR
• The Eclipse Modeling Framework and Xtext

External DSLs, like the internal ones, have a layer of abstraction on top of an existing domain model. Where they differ is how they implement the layer. External DSLs build their own language-processing infrastructure: the parsers, the lexers, and the processing logic.

We’re going to start with a discussion of the overall architecture of the processing infrastructure of an external DSL. The internal DSLs get this infrastructure free from the underlying host language, but the external DSLs need to build them from the ground up. First, ...