The Concrete Editor
- is a lightweight, web-based editor for Domain Specific Languages (DSLs)
- is setup for a specific DSL, knows the language commands and provides Auto Completion
- permanently checks the consistency with the DSL and provides Error Annotations
- can give language elements almost any look expressible with HTML and CSS
- is a Javascript widget which can be embedded into virtually any web application
- exchanges data with a backend via the widely used JSON format
- is based on Prototype and uses Scriptaculous
Screencast
Watch this 15 minutes screencast showing Concrete at several examples Concrete Screencast
Watch the last 15 minutes of the Talk on RGen and Concrete I gave at Rubyconf X in November 2010. If you are interested in RGen or the application of RGen and Concrete you are welcome to watch the whole talk of course.
Examples
Before checking out an example, be sure to have a look at the Concrete Cheat Sheet
Please use Firefox or Chrome to test the examples, there may be problems with other browsers.
Online Registration
This demo is a Ruby on Rails application implementing a online registration platform. The platform allows its users to setup online registrations via a Concrete based DSL. An online registration is basically defined by the data items which need to be collected from participants and the pages which hold the input fields for the data items. Pages can be conditional and they may contain constraints on the data being collected.
Online registrations created within this demo will be discarded every full hour.
State Machine Editor
This is an example editor for statemachines consisting of states and transitions between states. It comes in two flavours, one in a purely textual syntax and another one which shows the states more like a UML tool.
Try It! with textual syntax
Try It! with graphical syntax
Formula Editor
This is a simple formula editor showing how Concrete can be used to layout mathmatical syntax like square root or fraction signs. Numerical values like '5' or '100' must be wrapped in a 'value' element. This example does not allow the data to be saved.
Concrete Language Editor
This editor can be used to create new Concrete DSLs. More precisely, it allows to create the abstract syntax description of a DSL. Once the description is finished, select all (Ctrl-A) and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl-C). Then you can take the JSON from the clipboard area and use it to create a new Concrete editor for that new language. See the Concrete Developer's Guide for more details.
Documentation
- Concrete Cheat Sheet - A quick start for all Concrete users.
- Concrete User's Guide - More detailed information for Concrete users.
- Concrete Developer's Guide - Essential information for those who want to create their own Concrete DSL and embed Concrete in their own application.
Download
Head over to Github for the latest version of Concrete as well as for the examples.
Ruby users can also get Concrete as a gem: gem install concrete