JetBrains Introduces a New Programming Paradigm With its Meta Programming System

With the Beta Release of MPS, JetBrains Provides Concrete Language Oriented Programming Tools for Creating Real-Life Applications and DSLs JetBrains m creators of intelligent and innovative productivity enhancing tools for software developers, have announced the Beta version of their new product – Meta Programming System, or MPS. Meta Programming System is a brand new concept of software development environment implementing the Language Oriented Programming paradigm. After several years of research and development, JetBrains has released its Beta version now, targeting 1.0 forearly 2009.

Meta Programming System is an environment for professional software developers to create new custom languages, extend existing languages, and use them to develop programs. MPS is also an instrument for creating Domain Specific Languages (DSL). Domain experts who are not familiar with programming can easily use DSLs created with MPS.

MPS's main focus is to allow creating new languages and extending existing ones as easily as possible. Its advanced features enable defining language typesystems, constraints and specialized editors to produce new, powerful and easy-to-use languages. MPS uses a generative approach: languages are described on a higher level, and MPS generates compileable code in other languages, particularly in Java.

"When we started working on MPS back in 2003, it was a research project that could do very little, but was a lot of fun to play with," said Sergey Dmitriev, JetBrains CEO and the author of the MPS concept. "However, we have always been very serious about extensively using our own products, and right now we are already using MPS to develop new products. We always carefully listen to the developer community. With MPS being very different and new, we are extremely interested in receiving valuable feedback from developers."

MPS will be free for all users and, moreover, a major part of its code will be open-source (under Apache license).

JetBrains is confident that MPS has all the power to bring software development in general - and Language Oriented Development in particular - to a brand new level.

To learn more about JetBrains MPS, download it and give it a try today.

Meta Programming System started in 2003 as a research project. In 2004, its underlying concepts were described in the Language Oriented Programming article. In 2005, they opened an Early Access Program for MPS. they been using MPS since 2006 to develop some of new products. Over these years, they have accumulated a lot of our own experience and gathered valuable feedback from early adopters, and this turned MPS from a research project into a mature product that they want to present to you now. MPS is now released as Beta, with the 1.0 release planned for early 2009.

MPS is a free product with most of its source code available under Apache 2.0 license. Download MPS.

How Does MPS Work?

The major goal of MPS is to allow extending languages. This is because every existing language already has a strict language syntax defined, which limits its flexibility.

The problem in extending language syntax is mainly the textual presentation of code. This is especially true if we want to use different language extensions, where each one may have its own syntax.

This naturally leads to the idea of non-textual presentation of program code. A major benefit of this approach is that it eliminates the need for code parsing. Our solution is to have code always maintained in an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), which consists of nodes with properties, children and references, and fully describes the program code.

At the same time, MPS offers an efficient way to keep writing code in a text-like manner.

In creating a language, you define the rules for code editing and rendering. You can also specify the language type-system and constraints. This allows MPS to verify program code on the fly, and thus makes programming with the new language easy and less error-prone.

MPS uses a generative approach. You can also define generators for their language to transform code in the custom language to compilable code in some conventional language. Currently, MPS is particularly good for, but is not limited to, generating Java code. You can also generate XML, HTML, JavaScript, and more.