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xText? XPand? XBASE? We sometimes see different ways these names are being written in online publications and even scientific works. Here's a quick reminder on how to write them correctly and why this is important.

Names are defined in their notation and must be used as they are defined. This is especially true for the use of character casing. However, there seems to be some confusion on the right notation of the “X-frameworks” at Eclipse. We see these names so often with different styles of upper and lower case in written text like XText, xText or XTEXT.

Unfortunately this goes on for other names as well. Please note, that this is simply wrong. You won’t find any place in the official documentation or websites where these names are written with different case notations. So please use the right notation starting with a capital followed by lower case characters.

Here's a list of the correct notation of Eclipse's X-frameworks:

  • Xtext
  • Xtend
  • Xbase
  • Xcore
  • Xpand

We face wrong notations in articles, blog posts, forum questions, documents but even in contracts, bachelor or master thesis or CVs. Imagine how it looks like if you read a CV or profile of a person and this person can not even write the name of the technologies he uses correctly!

For any projects it is important to use their name consistent. It is already a mess how often you find the wrongly written names on the internet and this can only be explained by copy and pasting them without thinking about the right notation.

For Eclipse projects, the naming policy is even regulated by the Project Naming Policy. Eclipse Xtext and the other projects are trademarks of the Eclipse Foundation. Usage of the project names is defined in the Eclipse Logo & Trademark Guideline. Part of that is that on each public reference the first and the most prominent usage of the project name has to use "Eclipse" as a prefix.

We hope that this post helps a bit to disambiguate the names and helps you to avoid a common mistake. Please use the right notation and remind anyone using a wrong one to check their spelling and why it's important to get these names right. One way would be to politely send them to this post. Thanks! :)

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