From: Paul Klint
To:
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 07:42:25 +0100
Subject: Two lectures by IBM researchers

You are cordially inviated for the following two lectures:

Frank Tip: 
   Declarative Object Identity using Relation Types

Robert Fuhrer:
   SAFARI: A Meta-Tooling Platform for Creating Language-Specific IDE's

Date: Monday March 19, 2007

Time: 14:00-16:00

Venue: Centrum for Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Kruislaan 413, Amsterdam

Room: Z009

Details can be found below.

Regards,

-- Paul Klint

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SAFARI: A Meta-Tooling Platform for Creating Language-Specific IDE's

Robert Fuhrer, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Building a state-of-the-art Eclipse IDE for a new programming language is a 
difficult undertaking. Although much of this work is inevitable and requires an 
in-depth understanding of the language structure and semantics, a significant 
portion embodies common themes and code structures, and requires extensive 
knowledge of Eclipse API's, which represent a great opportunity for code and 
knowledge reuse in the form of a meta-tooling framework for IDE development.

SAFARI is an ongoing project at IBM Watson Research to develop such meta- 
tooling for Eclipse. The goal of the project is to ease the development of 
commercial-quality IDE support for new programming languages, including the 
following features:

    * generation and management of parsers, AST's, and semantic analysis
    * syntax highlighting, outline view population, package explorer-like
      navigation, content assistance, project natures and builders, error markers
    * refactoring support (not only "Move" and "Rename", but type- and
      code-related refactorings requiring non-trivial analysis, e.g. "Extract
      Method" and "Infer Type Arguments")
    * static program analysis (pointer analysis, type analysis, etc.) in support
      of the above
    * execution and debugging support

We accomplish this by a mixture of language service-creation wizards, class 
libraries to encapsulate common language-processing infrastructure, and code 
skeletons to get the language service-implementer started. Moreover, the SAFARI 
framework has been engineered to support the incremental specification and 
implementation of language services for languages that derive from an existing 
base language, as for example our X10 concurrent programming language does from 
Java. In this way, IDE's built using SAFARI are themselves extensible.

SAFARI has been driven in part from the need to produce full-featured IDE's for 
several language research activities at IBM Research, including:

    * the X10 language, a Java-derived language for highly concurrent programs
    * the XJ language, which integrates XML access, literal documents and schema
      types into Java
    * the JikesPG grammar specification language

In this talk, we will present the architecture, discuss the somewhat unusual 
demands that a full-featured IDE place on the compiler front-end, give a brief 
demonstration of our prototype of the SAFARI system, and describe our plans for 
its future.

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