EMFText 1.4.1 is out!

Get it while it's hot! For details about the release please consult the Release Notes and the New and Noteworthy pages.

Drag this link to a running Eclipse Juno instance (e.g., the title bar) to install EMFText:

Welcome to EMFText

EMFText is an Eclipse plug-in that allows you to define text syntax for languages described by an Ecore metamodel. EMFText enables developers to define textual Domain Specific Languages quickly and without the need to learn new technologies and concepts. Give it a shot and you'll find EMFText indispensible for your model-driven development processes (also see the top 10 reasons why to use EMFText).

Example DSL to model forms

We have lots of example languages, which makes it easy for you to define new languages (or language extensions) on your own. The zoo currently contains 100 ready made languages, including:

Features

Generation of independent code

Generated code does not contain dependencies to EMFText
All code is fully customizable
Generated language tooling is deployable in environments where EMFText is not available
Future compatibility issues are completely avoided
UI code is generated to a separate plug-in enabling the usage of DSLs in headless environments (e.g., on web servers)

Specification features

Automatic generation of default syntaxes (HUTN and Java-like)
Simple and precise syntax specification
Modular specification (Support for abstract syntaxes and syntax imports)
Default reference resolving mechanisms
Comprehensive syntax analysis to warn about potential syntax problems
Partial token definitions
Support for expression hierarchies

Editor features

Outline View
Customizable Syntax Highlighting
Occurence Highlighting
Code Completion
Advanced bracket handling
Hyperlinks
Texthovers
Instant error reporting
Quick fixes

Other features

ANT support to generate text syntax plug-ins in build scripts
Generation of builder and interpreter stubs
Generation of complete debugging infrastructure

Getting started

The EMFText feature is available from our Update-Site at http://emftext.org/update. To see more, watch the EMFText Installation Screencast.

The EMFText Getting Started Screencast demonstrates how to create a small example language with EMFText.

Documentation

Application areas

10 Reasons for using EMFText

Support

EMFText is optimized using JProfiler, which is made available to the EMFText team through an open source project license. Many thanks go to ej-technologies for making that possible!

History

The EMFText tool was originally developed as part of the Reuseware Composition Framework and later extracted into a single tool that can be used independently from Reuseware. Still, if you are a language developer, you might find that Reuseware can also improve your language. Try it out as well: Go to Reuseware.