Creating your own DSL with XText (Part II - project structure)

In part II we'll now have a look at the project structure. Here it goes:

There are three main sections.

Features the bundles you'll need for Eclipse

Plugins the actual code, XText-structured. I'll be using two DSL's, one for modelling the application strcuture, such as menus, forms/pages and page content such as fields, select boxes, check boxes etc. The second DSL models the actual test actions, such as login, enter "text" in field ABC etc. 
The plugins also includes the shared dependencies. Since Eclipse runs in an OSGi container (Equinox) all dependencies need to be packaged as OSGi bundles. So a word of advice: try to minimize your dependencies as the maintenance of the MANIFEST for the dependencies can become quite hectic otherwise.

Releases the p2 Eclipse structure that you'll need to use the Eclipse update manager

The project will have a parent pom that defines the skeleton structure, the dependencies, plugins, repositories etc.

As the DSL is to be used with Selenium we can pick any web application. Let's have a look at the Vaadin QuickTickets application. It has a login page and some forms/pages, good enough for our purpose.

In the next post we'll dive into the structure model and the test model.

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