Global architecture of JJForester: : Ellipses are tools. Shaded boxes are generated code.

JJForester takes a grammar defined in SDF as input, and generates Java code. In parallel, the parse table generator PGEN is called to generate a parse table from the grammar. The generated code is compiled together with code supplied by the user. When the resulting byte code is run on a Java Virtual Machine, invocations of parse methods will result in calls to the parser SGLR. From a given input term, SGLR produces a parse tree as output. These parse trees are passed through the parse tree implosion tool implodeasfixGT to obtain abstract syntax trees.