BlackBox

Well we got the first round of reviews back from the technical reviewers and there’s a lot of work to be done. So much so that we’ve decided to put the book on hold while we regroup and figure out if/how we are going to address the issues that the reviewers found with the book. In a lot of cases it is going to require a complete rewrite of the example (and hence the chapter itself). Personally I feel the core is there, but maybe the examples weren’t as fleshed out as they could have been.

Now of course I’m a little embarrassed that I announced the book before it was done, but that’s what happens sometimes. Not sure at this point whether or not the book will continue, taking some time to regroup/rethink things and see if it is something that I want to push forward with.

I will keep everyone up to date here on the progress of things once I’ve decided what to do. In the meantime I am going to get back to some of my back-burner projects (a few of which have some DSLs in them ;-).

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.