Next milestone of DSL Editor powertoy reached

  • Article

Jezz has just announced the release of the next milestone in this project. To quote:

<quote>We released the next milestone of the DSL Editor PowerToy today on CodePlex.

"A means to add multiple editors to your DSL, either hosted in a tool-window, or replace the graphical designer of your DSL"

</quote>

Thanks Jezz for implementing my suggestion of allowing the editors to be hosted in a a window that replaces the graphical design surface. When this powertoy is complete, it will be really easy to produce a forms-based DSL for languages which either don't suit a graphical representation, or where the effort of designing the graphical syntax is deemed not worth the investment. That's in addition to using the tool window in conjunction with a graphical surface. I'm really looking forward to the next milestone where we start to see some generated UI for the content.

Also, related to my last post, it's great to see Jezz exploiting our approach of generating code from a dsl definition then allowing that code to be further extended through custom code. This has allowed Jezz to look for patterns in custom code you would need to write to implement his editors, and then add new code generators (and, his case, a new DSL as well) to generate to those patterns. This allows the capabilities of the tools to be extended by third parties, to cover all those bits we haven't thought of yet or haven't had time to implement.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 21, 2007
    In my most recent post , I mentioned that the DSL Editor powertoy shows how you can exploit the openness