Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Diesel - DSL experiments on the JVM (Part 2)

In part 1 we explored some simple ways to fake a DSL using JSON and YAML. In part 2 we will expend a little more effort to build a more powerful mini-DSL.

By "powerful", I mean a DSL that not only supports the language structure we like but also allows for more complex constructs like method calls and expressions.

For this task, I chose Groovy, which is a really nice, Ruby-like language that is tightly integrated with Java. Later, I will also explore Ruby using JRuby just to show how similar Groovy and Ruby are in many aspects.

Groovy runs on the JVM and so it integrates seamlessly with Java. Even IntelliJ comes with native support for Groovy.Groovy can be used like a plain scripted, interpreted language or even compiled. It is a little slower than Java but offers a lot of powerful metaprogramming features to balance it out. I will not go into the details but suffice to say that it is particularly useful for building (surprise!) DSLs. For full blown examples see Cloudify, Gradle, this or this.

At first, I chose the simple approach of just using Groovy as a scripting language to specify the stocks. It didn't really look like a DSL because it is not.

Next, with just a tiny bit of setup where I make some ready made expressions and methods available to the script, I was able to specify my stocks in a nicer and more powerful format. The cool "with" syntax in Groovy also helped.

To demonstrate that I could also write executable code, I had the script print the date and name of the file in the first line.

I've just scratched the Groovy surface because I could've spent a lot more time overloading numeric types like the goodFor property where I could've used "30.days" but I didn't. There are obviously holes in my implementation but you cannot dismiss the speed at which you can get at least this much functionality. Perhaps with a little more Groovy proficiency and time, I could've done better.

Now on to Ruby. To show how similar Groovy and Ruby are, I used JRuby to build this DSL:

I also have a simpler, raw JRuby script but then it's not a DSL but just a script. Again note the similarities with Groovy.

Getting JRuby to integrate neatly with my Stocks beans was a little challenging. It required a slightly different setup. I also ran into some issues which are not documented well in JRuby. So, I asked for help on the mailing list but haven't heard from them. This coupled with the fact that JRuby startup takes several seconds made testing and experimenting a little frustrating.

Ruby in itself is used in a lot of places to build DSLs like Chef, RSpec and a lot of other projects.

One option I obviously overlooked is Scala. Scala is well known (among the Scala users) for its "apparently" powerful language features. However, in my opinion Scala's complex, sometimes bizarre, dense and obtuse syntax might keep it out of reach of average engineers like myself. I've shared this opinion earlier too.

So, that's it for now. I may extend this preliminary work on Diesel later when I have the time. Or better yet, you can fork it and share it.

Cheers!
Ashwin.

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