Monday, October 8, 2012

Revisited: Xtend @ JavaOne 2012

My talk about Xtend at this years JavaOne is now available in the content catalog on the conference website.

After a quick motivation and the answer to the obvious question "Why the heck did these guys develop yet another JVM language?", I gave a short overview on the basic ideas and design principles behind Xtend. Next up was a demo with different code snippets. Basically it was a walk-through with the examples that can be loaded into everybody's Eclipse as soon as the Xtend SDK is installed. Just select New -> Example... -> Xtend Introductory Examples and there you go.

The last part of the talk was about Active Annotations, a unique feature that will be part of the next version of Xtend. To put it into a few words it's Java's annotation processing on steroids. Active annotations may contribute to the translation of Xtend code to Java and even modify the result of that process. They allow to create additional types, use information from other resources or validate the Xtend code according to the annotation's semantics. Along with the powerful means to design creative and expressive APIs and the tight integration with Xtext languages, Xtend's exceptional support for domain-specific languages is raised to the next level by Active Annotations. Stay tuned for more information!

1 comment:

betto said...

The annotation framework is way cool! :)