Now that things feel a little bit more final to me I thought I would take this opportunity to announce the book that’s been keeping me from blogging. The tentative title is Creating DSLs using Java and Groovy and it will be published by Pragmatic Programmers. I started working on this idea after last years No Fluff Just Stuff where I saw Neal Ford speak on DSLs and I talked to him briefly about a project I was working on. His talk inspired me to push forward with using DSLs for code generation specifically using Groovy.
The book will cover both Java and Groovy techniques for writing DSLs, as well as have some general guidelines for writing DSLs. We also have a chapter on ANTLR and JavaCC for writing external DSLs using Java. I tried to cover as much as I could of Groovy meta-programming and some of the additional capabilities of Groovy that make it a good language to write an internal DSL on top of, but there’s only so much space
.
We just sent off the book for peer review, which means its about half-way finished, maybe a little more. We are currently shooting for a release date sometime early next year, which looks very doable at this point, but I expect a ton of edits to come back from this first review.
On a final note I just want to say what a pleasure it has been working with the PragProg crew. I love, love, love their book build system and my editor Susannah rocks. I have had a blast working with them so far on this book and am looking forward to finishing this up and getting it published.
Related Posts: