Things I have learnt when working on a XText project. Follow up post for Learning XText - part 0

Within 3 months, I:

  • Read and do exercise 60% of the book Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

  • Learn and use Xtend in production. It’s a nice JVM functional language. But, for daily usage, I would prefer Scala over it. Xtend has too much magic.

  • Learn Scala, read 32/35 chapters in the book Programming in Scala, 2nd Edition. Honestly, I can’t remember everything I learnt in that book. But, the way the authors teaching the language design, practice, and programming principles is enlightened. That’s a much read.

  • Learn about Property-based testing and use ScalaCheck for test the core library of my project. (Actually, I was first read about Property-based testing, then ScalaCheck, and finally decided to give Scala a try.)

  • Setup maven site to generate javadoc, test report and even user guide, documentation. For the documentation, I used Doxia with its Markdown module.

  • Setup and integrate Jenkins with Gerrit to build on any new commit, then generate maven site, and publish it in our internal server.

  • Learn about NSIS, and write script to build the installer for Window. I also configured maven pom.xml so that the installer could be generated on all machines I touched (custom’s PC, my Ubuntu and the headless server).

  • Use java-simple-serial-connector to replace the unmaintained, buggy, confusing APIs and hard to use rxtx.

  • Develop a small library that fulfil a custom serial port communication protocol, base on customer’s spec.

  • Develop a command line utility base on above library to communicate with hardware, works perfectly on the hardware that fulfil protocol specification. (Yes, I’ve discover flaws on some implementation on hardware side during testing this CLI util)

  • Develop IDE-like application based on Eclipse Rich Client Platform and Xtext with following features:

    • IDE features: syntax highlighting, auto-completion, outline, project management, template…
    • Built-in standard libraries to communicate via serial port. One is mentioned above, and one is extracted from anther project, and then modified to work with this application.
    • Execute the script and generate report in HTML or Markdown 1 format.
    • Run on both Linux and Window.


  1. For that task, I have looking for a library that generate Markdown from Java object (see this question). No such thing as the time. ↩