The MPS Language Workbench: Volume I

Fabien Campagne

May 2014 · The MPS Language Workbench Book 1 · Fabien Campagne

About this ebook

The MPS Language Workbench, Volume I (third edition). The first volume of the series is both a simple introduction to the JetBrains MPS language workbench and a complete reference manual. 

The Meta-Programming System (MPS) is a new kind of tool called a language workbench that simply stated makes it easier and more fun to write programs. With traditional programming, it is common to choose one programming language to solve a problem and being limited by this choice. When working with MPS you can use and combine different languages to solve a problem. You can also create simple languages (e.g., Domain Specific Languages) or extend existing ones when the languages available do not exactly meet the evolving needs of the problem at hand. The languages that you create with MPS will integrate nicely with languages developed by others. 

MPS is open-source and can be obtained from http://jetbrains.com/mps or http://github.com/JetBrains/MPS. This 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 and the powerful new approach to programming that this tool offers.

The third edition of this book describes MPS 3.3.

Ratings and reviews

I am a long-term Intellij Idea user and since I first heard about the relatively new MPS Language Workbench, I wanted to explore it and see its use cases. JetBrains provides some basic documentation about the tool, but it is far from being complete especially if you seriously consider adopting this framework in your workflow/pipeline. To this end, this book addresses a huge documentation gap and provides information about MPS basics with tutorial-like examples. Often times, the text is accompanied with screenshots that have step-by-step annotation on them, which is really helpful for reproducing the steps mentioned in the book. If you have really little or no experience with the JetBrains development environment, this book will definitely serve you well. For those of you who have been developing softwares with JetBrains tools, it is still a good book to get to know the new MPS framework and you will find it easier to digest the book.

This book is written in a very accessible way. I've got it when I was on a beginners level and had no problems in reading it. It introduces MPS and has several illustrations and examples to help you comprehend what is being read. It's a very good reference point to anyone starting or even using MPS.

About the author

Fabien Campagne, PhD, is the head of a scientific laboratory working in the field of Bioinformatics. His laboratory develops computational approaches to help manage and analyze biological data (http://campagnelab.org). Over the years, Dr. Campagne has led the development of several large-scale bioinformatics systems that take advantage of a wide range of software engineering and programming techniques.  Dr. Campagne is routinely evaluating new approaches to software engineering and programming that can help his laboratory develop bioinformatics software more efficiently. He wrote this book because he found the MPS Language Workbench a very powerful open-source tool for programming and system design, which lacked a well-designed and accessible introductory and reference textbook.