plugin-generator

CRSX Plugin Generator

This is a project to generate plugins which enable editing Domain Specific Language files used either for or with CRSX.

There are two kinds of plugins we are working to generate:

(1) PG-defined Domain Specific Language

A PG file defines a domain specific language, generally for a compiler intermediate format, and once the PG file has been defined, it would be nice to have plugins used to edit this syntax in various development environments.

Since the PG file already defines the syntax enough to parse files of this format, the GUI plugins for the various development environments should be able to be auto-generated.

(2) CRSX rule definition files

One special feature of CRSX is the ability to use the "native" format defined in the PG file within CRSX rules definitions.

This means that when editing code used to define a CRSX-based compiler, the code includes CRSX code and also includes embedded DSL-code for the various intermediate representations, as well as CRSX code embedded within the DSL code.

Again, a developer would prefer a GUI plugin to the various development frameworks that understands and assists with editing this highly-customized format.

These reasonable PG-specific plugins have long been dreamed-of as an aid that makes writing CRSX-based compilers much easier and more maintainable. This project hopes to provide that functionality.

This project is provided under the Eclipse Public License 1.0.

Building and usage of the plugin-generator

You can build the tool using maven by simply by invoking default goal:

mvn

The tool can be executed using wrapper shell script pgenerator.sh

Command line options

If you want to see list of supported command line options run

./pgenerator.sh --help

Usage examples:

• Take grammar.pg file and produce grammarPlugin.zip containing sources for eclipse plugin supporting single language from grammar.pg:

./pgenerator.sh --zip --output grammarPlugin.zip grammar.pg

• Take grammar.pg and produce sources for eclipse plugin supporting single language from grammar.pg into directory /home/user/pluginsources:

./pgenerator.sh --output /home/user/pluginsources grammar.pg

• Take grammar.pg and produce grammar.xtext containing just xtext grammar for the language from grammar.pg:

./pgenerator.sh --xtext grammar.pg

• Take grammar.pg and produce archive repository.zip containing update site with CRSX plugin supporting embedded language specified by grammar.pg.

./pgenerator.sh --crsx gramar.pg --updatesite --zip --output repository.zip

• Take grammar.pg, generate sources for both CRSX plugin with support for embedded language defined by grammar.pg and build those plugins using maven located at /opt/maven, producing updatesite containing both plugins in com.example.language.multiple.updatesite/target/repository

./pgenerator.sh --all grammar.pg --output ~/plugins_sources/ --maven /opt/maven --build

Building generated plugin with maven

When running with --single or --crsx switch, the utility will produce five project directories with following names (expecting the grammar package to be com.example.language ):

• com.example.language
• com.example.language.parent
• com.example.language.sdk
• com.example.language.ui
• com.example.language.updatesite

Generated plugin can be built with maven version 3+ by running following commands:

cd com.example.language.parent
mvn package

After succesfull build of the plugin you can install it just by pointing your eclipse to com.example.language.updatesite/target/repository directory.

Building generated plugin directly from utility

You need to have maven v3+ installed on your system in order to build the plugins directly from the utility. Location of maven home directory must be specified either by setting M2_HOME environment variable, or by explicitly providing path to the directory with --maven <MAVEN_HOME> command line attribute. You can choose one of the two build modes:

• --build - utility will invoke maven package goal in parent project directory right after the sources are generated. When build process is finished you should find eclipse update site repository in com.example.language.updatesitee/target/repository directory

• --updatesite - utility will generate all sources into temporary directory and then builds them using maven. After the build is done eclipse update site repository is moved to location specified by --output command line argument. This option can be also combined with --zip switch (in that case, zip archive containing eclipse update repository is created).

Plugin dependencies

By default maven pom.xml files in generated plugins are configured not to include dependencies in the resulting repositories. This can be changed by using -d/--include_dependencies when running plugin generator. Plugin repository will then contain all dependencies. This can increase repository size significantly (Eclipse repository of simple plugin with all Xtext dependecies has ~90MiB).