On our 6th meetup of the softwerkskammer Lübeck we were lucky to have Sven Efftinge as our guest. He is the project lead for XText, organisator of the Nordic Coding Event and works at itemis.

He presented XTend, a language on the JVM that is build with XText and which compiles to java source code. After a walkthrough he shows with an example how easy it is to build a DSL with XText. The whole presentation was done by showing code! In my opinion the best way and he did a great job in answering questions.

What differenciates XTend from the varios JVM languages like groovy, scala, kotlin etc.? It does not need it´s own bytecode compile since XTend it translated at compile time to java source code. In that way XTend can be seen as “syntactic sugar” for java - or a domain specific language. (writing java code without the boilerplate)

I think the advantage of XTend lies in it´s lightweight character: you are still writing java, but just in a better way. It´s like CoffeeScript for JavaScript.

It was a great meetup with some really good discussions in the end! Looking forward for the upcoming meeting in June!