Parser building is a powerful programming technique that opens a world of opportunity for designing how users interact with applications. By creating mini-languages, you can precisely address the requirements of your application development domain. Writing your own parsers empowers you to access a database more effectively than SQL to efficiently control the movement of an order through its workflow, to command the actions of a robot, and to control access privileges to transactions in a system. The repertoire of today's professional programmer should include the know-how to create custom languages.
Building Parsers with Java™ shows how to create parsers that recognize custom programming languages. This book and its accompanying CD provide an in-depth explanation and clearly written tutorial on writing parsers, following the Interpreter Design Pattern. An easy-to-follow demonstration on how to apply parsers to vital development tasks is included, using more than a hundred short examples, numerous UML diagrams, and a pure Java parser toolkit to illustrate key points.
You will learn
- How to design, code, and test a working parser
- How to create a parser to read a data language, and how to create new computer languages with XML
- How to translate the design of a language into code
- How to accept an arithmetic formula and compute its result
- How to accept and apply matching expressions like th* one
- How to use tokenizers to define a parser in terms of logical nuggets instead of individual characters
- How to build parsers for a custom logic language like Prolog
- How to build parsers for a custom query language that goes beyond SQL
- How to construct an imperative language that translates text into commands that direct a sequence of actions
The CD contains all of the examples and the parser toolkit, including more than three hundred Java classes and their corresponding javadoc. The CD also provides example programs for the new logic, query, and imperative languages that this book introduces.
With the information, methods, and tools in this book/CD package, you can create new computer languages that exactly fit your domain. You can nestle a new language into any niche, defining how your users interact with computers.
About the Author
Steven John Metsker is a Managing Consultant with Dominion Digital, an information technology and business process reengineering company. Steve specializes in object-oriented techniques for creating clean, powerful software, and he is the author of Building Parsers with Java™, Design Patterns Java™ Workbook, and Design Patterns in C# (all from Addison-Wesley).
