Silverchain: a fluent API generator

Abstract

This paper presents a tool named Silverchain, which generates class definitions for a fluent API from the grammar of the API. A fluent API is an API that is used by method chaining and its grammar is a BNF-like set of rules that defines method chains accepted in type checking. Fluent APIs generated by Silverchain provide two styles of APIs: One is for building a chain by concatenating all method calls in series. The other is for building a chain from partial chains by passing child chains to method calls in the parent chain as their arguments. To generate such a fluent API, Silverchain first translates given grammar into a set of deterministic pushdown automata without ϵ-transitions, then encodes these automata into class definitions. Each constructed automata corresponds to a nonterminal in given grammar and recognizes symbol sequences produced from its corresponding nonterminal.