Interview with Dr. Jan Köhnlein on Xtext, Xtend, Xcore, FXDiagram, and TypeFox

Dr. Jan Köhnlein is one of the founders of TypeFox, the moving force behind Xtext, Xtend, and FXDiagram. This is a very extensive follow-up interview to this one. Thanks again to Jan!

Dear Jan, thank you very much for your time. I really like the ecosystem around Xtext, Xtend, Xcore, Xbase, and EMF. I think it is one of the most-disrupting decisions (in a positive way) that, starting from 2.9.0, you address more than just the Eclipse platform! But with this new approach and your all new company TypeFox (as well as the spin-off from itemis), some questions arise…

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Scopes in XText 2.9.x with XCore and Generics

This post is about some juggling with technologies in the EMF ecosystem, namely XText and XCore. Consider a small (and not completely realistic) DSL for defining entity types (like the introductory grammar example of the XText documentation). Often there are two different kinds of types in such a language:

  1. primitive/native types, provided by the system, e.g., String, Integer, Boolean, …
  2. composite/complex types, which have been modeled in the language and can have attributes of primitive type or refer to other complex types

So we might model these variants of properties as Attribute for primitive types and Association for complex types…

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