Tuesday, November 03, 2009

DSLs In Action - Updates on the Book Progress

DSLs In Action has been out for a month now in MEAP with the first 3 chapters being published. DSL is an emerging topic and I am getting quite some feedback from the readers who have already purchased the MEAP edition. Thanks for all the feedback.

Writing a book also has lots of similarities with coding. Particularly the refactoring part. The second attempt to articulate a piece of thought is almost always better than the first attempt, much like coding. You cannot imagine how many times I have discarded my first attempt and rewrote the stuff only to get a better feel of what I try to express for my readers.

Anyway, this post is not about book writing. Since the MEAP is out, I thought I should post a brief update on the progress since then .. here they are more as a list of bullet points :-

I delivered Chapter 4 and already got quite a few feedbacks on it. Chapter 4 starts the DSL Implementation section of the book. From here onwards expect lots of code snippets, zillions of implementation techniques that you may try out on your IDE. Chapter 4 deals with Implementation Patterns in Internal DSL. I discuss some of the common idioms that you will be using while implementing internal DSLs. As per the premise of the book, the snippets and idioms are in Ruby, Groovy, Clojure and Scala. It's more of a focus on the strengths of each of these languages that help you implement well designed DSLs. This chapter prepares the launching pad for some more extensive DSL implementations in Chapter 5. It's not there in MEAP yet, but here's the detailed ToC for Chapter 4.

Chapter 4 : Internal DSL Implementation Patterns

4.1. Building up your DSL Toolbox
4.2. Embedded DSL - Patterns in Meta-programming
4.2.1. Implicit Context and Smart APIs
4.2.2. Dynamic Decorators using Mixins
4.2.3. Hierarchical Structures using Builders
4.2.4. New Additions to your Toolbox
4.3. Embedded DSL - Patterns with Typed Abstractions
4.3.1. Higher Order Functions as Generic Abstractions
4.3.2. Explicit Type Constraints to model Domain logic
4.3.3. New Additions to your Toolbox
4.4. Generative DSL - Boilerplates for Runtime Generation
4.5. Generative DSL - One more tryst with Macros
4.6. Summary
4.7. Reference

Chapter 5 is also in the labs right now. But almost complete. I hope to post another update soon ..

Meanwhile .. Enjoy!

3 comments:

fogus said...

Looking forward to digging deeply into the book... especially the Clojure bits. ;)

Unknown said...

@fogus:
Sure .. would love to have your feedbacks too. Email (dghosh AT acm DOT org), blog comments, or you can raise issues in Author Online at manning.com/ghosh.

Jacek said...

@Debasish:
I appreciate all your writings.
A minor remark regarding diagrams. They look stylish, but the hand-writing font makes them a little harder to read especially on computer screen.