documentation

Little progress can be made without honest feedback. The MPS online documentation was migrated to a new JetBrains platform earlier this year. Along the way, the MPS team has been putting effort into making the documentation more complete and up-to-date. To move forward with the documentation, we need your help: If you fail to find documentation for a certain feature. If you discover wrong or misleading information. If you think some text or image is obsolete or inaccurate. If you’d like to suggest improvements or want to contribute a piece of text. If you come across anything l

If you are curious to hear some news, insights and future plans about MPS and if you have missed the interview about MPS that Federico Tomassetti has posted last week, this is a good time to check it out. The article will tell you more about the upcoming features, detail the web-based projectional editor, give some examples of MPS usages in the wild as well as provide opinions on positioning MPS on the software tool market. We would like to thank Federico for coming up with this wonderful idea, preparing spot-on questions as well as adding his own opinions to the mix. Enjoy reading the i

We have some good news for the MPS users out there today - Fabien Campagne has just sent the second volume of his MPS Workbench book to print and made it available for sale. The book continues in the good tradition set by the first volume to provide detailed reference documentation of the individual knobs and levers that MPS offers to language designers. You can find a wide range of topics covered, such as: Language evolution - language versions and migrations Extending the MPS UI - actions, menus, tool panels, etc. The Dataflow aspect of language definition The Build language The

We would like to let you know about one additional option to learn MPS - JetBrains has started offering MPS trainings for those, who prefer intense supervised study with hands-on practical exercises. You can currently choose from an introductory MPS course and an intermediate one. These trainings are lead by experienced core MPS developers, who have the knowledge and skills to help you gain insight into the technology through the most convenient paths. Check out the details about the courses and do not hesitate to sign up, if you are interested: Introductory MPS Course Intermediate M

Thanks to Marco Lombardo, the wiki-based MPS 3.3 user guide is now also available as a polished, nicely looking, downloadable pdf document.  Compared to the previous version of the pdf guide this variant is much better formatted and structured. Marco has put effort into laying out the document nicely and styling it properly. If you always wanted to have an alternative to the web-based MPS guide, get the pdf version and enjoy! The Drive to Develop -JetBrains MPS Team

This week the MPS project has been migrated to a new forum platform. Those of you, who have been using the MPS forum in the past, have noticed that the old system has no longer been providing the comfort and ease of used that we all deserve and need. Massive spam attacks a while back had forced us to implement restrictive counter-measures that made our life unnecessarily difficult. This time is now over. The new platform should give us back the joy that comes from sharing ideas, helping others and discussing conceptual issues. Please bookmark the new links: http://devnet.jetbrains

Now with the 3.2 release of MPS approaching, we've updated the introductory materials that aim at introducing newbies to MPS. Typical readers of this blog have probably got over the beginner stage, but many of you may still benefit from some of the materials or use the pointers listed here to help your friends and colleagues to start with MPS smoothly. Here are the most prominent updates: The Fast Track to MPS tutorial has been updated in many sections so it could be considered the best place to start learning MPS You may have seen the new What JetBrains MPS can do for you? video. If

Cover We are glad to let you know about a new book dedicated to MPS: The MPS Language Workbench, Volume I. The first volume of the series is both a simple introduction to MPS and a thorough reference manual. Written by Fabien Campagne, a passionate user of MPS, the book explains the MPS programming paradigm and gradually introduces the reader to the many features of the MPS platform. This book may yet be the simplest way to discover the MPS language workbench. The first volume covers the structure and editor aspects, actions, intentions and the textgen and generator aspects in detail. Le

Listening to your numerous requests we managed to prepare an overview document describing how scopes work in MPS 3.0 and how you should use them. If scoping is something that has been puzzling you, please check out the Scope doc. Develop with pleasure! -JetBrains MPS Team

MPS back in version 2.5 considerably improved the way projects could be built. A new build language has been created, languages can be distributed as MPS or IntelliJ IDEA plugins and you can also create standalone IDEs around your own DSLs. The build language has undergone further improvements and polish in MPS 3.0. To ease you the start, we've prepared and published several educative documents over time. Please find bellow a consolidated list of all the documentation and screen-casts related to the build language and the build process in MPS: The build language documentation Building Inte

Debugging typically helps you gain insight in what's happening down in the code. Debugging the type-system is a special challenge, though. The MPS type-system engine performs type calculations on the type-system rules trying to match types to the language elements used in the code. You, as a language designer, are interested in seeing the high-level picture of what's happening, what type is assigned to what element, when and why. The MPS Type-System Trace tool, that some of you may already know, gives you exactly that. We've prepared a Typesystem Debugging document describing the ways you can

While playing with the 3.0 EAP releases, you may consider checking out the updated MPS generator tutorial. It has undergone a major rewrite to accommodate for all the recent changes to the MPS generator and to better serve the purpose of teaching the various code generation techniques that MPS offers. The bundled generator_demo sample project, which you find in the MPS 3.0 EAP distro, has been updated, too. Develop with pleasure! -JetBrains MPS Team