[news.eclipse.technology.ldt] keeping an eye on the competition :-)

[Chris Daly <cjdaly@xxxxxxxxxx>]

One way to shape our thinking about what LDT could and should try to do 
would be to look at what other IDEs are doing today in the 
multi-language space and where they are going.

What follows are some notes on projects I've been tracking that have to 
do with IDEs that come with integrated language designers and language 
tooling generators:

- Sergey Dmitriev, of the IntelliJ IDE company JetBrains, recently wrote 
a manifesto called "Language Oriented Programming" where he talks about 
a new IDE he is developing that includes a "Structure Language" and an 
"Editor Language".  These are languages designed to express languages 
and their IDE tooling.
http://www.onboard.jetbrains.com/is1/articles/04/10/lop/
http://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

- The company Xactium has a product called XMF-Mosaic which is sort of 
an IDE for designing DSLs and building the IDE tooling for the DSLs you 
design.  I really recommend their book "Applied Metamodeling" which you 
can download for free from their site (go to Downloads area).
http://albini.xactium.com/content/

- Microsoft has a project called "DSL tools" for Visual Studio.  Look 
for their developer blogs that talk about it and also look at the book 
Software Factories (Greenfield et al.), especially chapter 8.
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/teamsystem/community/blogs/
http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecook
http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent


These are just three examples and they surely reflect my bias towards 
DSLs.  I'd be interested in hearing more from you all (I'm sure Tim and 
the others from Borland could add something to this) about non-Eclipse 
multi-language efforts that would be good models to study to help shape 
the LDT.


Chris