The April 2022 Eclipse Cloud DevTools contributor award goes to Luca Forstner for his work towards improving the VS Code integration of Eclipse GLSP. Congratulations and thanks for your contributions!
The Eclipse Graphical Language Server Platform (GLSP) is an extensible open source framework for building custom diagram editors based on web technologies. Diagram editors developed with GLSP can be embedded into any web page or application. A common scenario is to embed diagrams into a tool or IDE, e.g. into VS Code, Eclipse Theia or the Eclipse desktop IDE.
For these three common cases, GLSP provides out-of-the-box integration support. With this integration, GLSP diagram editors can, for instance, be opened by double-clicking files, be shown in a native editor tab, display their dirty state in the editor tab, and integrate with the IDE’s global save and undo/redo actions. You can find a full list of available features here.
Luca Forstner, as part of his bachelor’s thesis, significantly contributed to the GLSP integration in VS Code. By looking at the feature table, you can see that the integrations into Theia and VS Code are almost on par with each other. Some use cases of the diagram integration are still not supported in VS Code. This is mainly due to a lack of flexibility in the VS Code extension API as compared to Eclipse Theia as a platform.
An Eclipse GLSP diagram editor running in VS Code
Luca's contribution is a great example of how academic work and an open source ecosystem mutually benefit from each other. Due to his open source contribution, the practical results of his bachelor’s thesis provide a significant value to the ecosystem. The technical level of his contribution was also excellent. Therefore, this award is very well deserved. Congratulations Luca!
This Eclipse Cloud DevTools contributor award is sponsored by EclipseSource, providing consulting and implementation services for web-based tools, Eclipse GLSP, Eclipse Theia, and VS Code.