JetBrains, creators of intelligent and innovative productivity-enhancing tools for software developers, have announced the Beta version of their new product - Meta Programming System, or MPS. Meta Programming System is a brand new concept of software development environment implementing the Language Oriented Programming paradigm. After several years of research and development, JetBrains has released its Beta version now, targeting 1.0 for early 2009.

Meta Programming System is an environment for professional software developers to create new custom languages, extend existing languages, and use them to develop programs. MPS is also an instrument for creating Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Domain experts who are not familiar with programming can easily use DSLs created with MPS.

MPS's main focus is to allow creating new languages and extending existing ones as easily as possible. Its advanced features enable defining language typesystems, constraints and specialized editors to produce new, powerful and easy-to-use languages. MPS uses a generative approach: languages are described on a higher level, and MPS generates compilable code in other languages, particularly in Java.

When we started working on MPS back in 2003, it was a research project that could do very little, but was a lot of fun to play with, said Sergey Dmitriev, JetBrains CEO and the author of the MPS concept. However, we have always been very serious about extensively using our own products, and right now we are already using MPS to develop new products. We always carefully listen to the developer community. With MPS being very different and new, we are extremely interested in receiving valuable feedback from developers.

MPS will be free for all users and, moreover, a major part of its code will be open-source (under Apache license).

JetBrains is confident that MPS has all the power to bring software development in general - and Language Oriented Development in particular - to a brand new level.

To learn more about JetBrains MPS, download it and give it a try today. See the official MPS website at http://www.jetbrains.com/mps.