Watch this introductory screencast (download ZIP file, unzip it and open the semanticAnnotationsIntroScreencast.html file in your browser).

Many languages defined with oAW Xtext have aspects in common. One way of exploiting this is to modularize language definitions and then composing specific languages from these modules. However, because of shortcomings of the current (4.3.1) version of Xtext, this is not necessarily a very viable approach.

This semantic annotation toolkit provides support for another approach. Languages are built from scratch (i.e. there is no reuse between grammar fragments), but the semantics of various language building blocks are still reusable. By annotating grammar elements with semantic annotations, the necessary Xtext infrastructure can be generated to make those grammar elements behave in a specific way.

Technically, this is implemented by generating extensions and checks as well as by model transformations and extensions of the meta- model.

This toolkit provides support for this approach.

Note that this is the first version of the toolkit. It will be extended over time with more semantic annotations.

Take a look at the latest documentation on the download page.