Together with the MPS team, the mbeddr team (and in particular, Sascha) have been working over the last few months on the ability to use graphical notations as part of MPS languages. While this is still an ongoing effort, it is now mature and complete enough to be used for real. If you have downloaded the recent mbeddr master branch, you will have noticed that, for example, component wiring can now be done graphically. The screenshot below shows a simple example of graphical component wiring:

This screenshot shows a few interesting features: you can embed diagrams anywhere in "text", you can use different shapes (at this point drawn by custom Java code), you can use various line styles, the framework supports ports (i.e., connection endpoints on the boxes), inside boxes you can use arbitrary MPS text (or other) editors, and the system also supports edge and endpoint labels. Port labels are also supported, but they are only shown if the mouse is "in the vicinity" of the port to not clutter the diagram. Below is a second screenshot of a bigger diagram:

This one illustrates that the approach scales to reasonable sizes, shows that zooming is supported and also demonstrates the auto layouting capability. The graphical notation also integrates with things such as tooltips. Below is another example diagram that shows a different language:

The definition of a graphical editor is based on the same "cell" abstraction used in other MPS editors: the language for defining editors contains additional cells that are then rendered as a diagram. Similar to tables, these abstractions for defining graphical editors rely on queries to make sure that the structure of the graphical editor does not have to directly correspond to the structure of the AST (for example, in terms of ownership).

The next steps for the graphical notations include improvements to robustness, and support for hierarchical diagrams. In addition, a shape library and a framework for simplified shape definition is being developed.

JetBrains is also developing a framework for graphical notations in MPS that has a number of different trade-offs. However, we are in the process of agreeing on a common definition language so that the concrete rendering engines can be exchanged with very limited effort.

To experiment with this stuff, make sure you download the mbeddr.platform and/ or check out the sources of mbeddr. The graphical notation itself lives at github.