Great Indian Developer Summit- 2009, Day-4. GIDS.Workshops:

This was the last day of the Great Indian Developer Summit-2009. There were 15 workshops running in parallel at 4 different halls. Workshops covered areas like JRuby, DSLs, Silverlight, Oslo, .Net, Hibernate, Adone Flash platform, COBOL among others. The first workshop I attended was “Developing external DSLs in Java” and was taken by Venkat Subramaniam who is regarded as the languages geek. He spoke about the need for Domain Specific Languages(DSL), different types of DSLs which include Internal DSL and External DSL. He told that internal DSLs can be created by using languages like Groovy, Ruby among others and External DSLs can be created using languages with higher parsing abilities like Java, C++, C#. Internal DSLs are also called as embedded DSL. He aslo threw some light on EasyB which is basically a behavior oriented design tool. He spoke at lenght on how to use Java to create external DSL using xText and Eclipse. He later gave a demo on using xText and created a game DSL. Sadly i couldn’t work it out on my comp as I did not have xText plugin installed in Eclipse.