Good ANTLR Resource

12 Sep 2008

I was playing around with ANTLR today and was at bit overwhelmed at both the detail and lack of detail in various documentation and resources I was able to find. Plenty of grammar examples kicking around but some more recent tutorials that used ANTLR v3 would have been helpful.

The problem I’m trying to solve is simple, define a grammar for a basic search language (to potentially be extended over time), parse it into an AST and manipulate appropriately.

After some initial frustration, I did make headway on parts 1 + 2 of the plan. We’ll see how the rest plays out next week.

For the benefit of others, if you’re looking to get started with ANTLR, here’s a useful introduction blog post. A quick search on dzone would have saved some trial and error.

For what it’s worth, getting ANTLR hooked into Maven is pretty simple and there’s decent documentation available for that. The IntelliJ plugin for ANTLRWorks is quite slick and includes a nice debugger.

I’m going to have to pickup The Definitive ANTLR Reference if this implementation pans out.