The Eclipse Cloud DevTools contributor award for this month goes to the dedicated Theia developers at STMicroelectronics, Ericsson, Arm and EclipseSource for enabling "Detachable Views" in Eclipse Theia.
Detachable views in IDEs and tools have been a standard feature on the desktop for years. And there's a good reason for that. Some tasks, like debugging or tracing, require several views to be open at the same time in order to understand the full picture of the interrelated data, source code, etc. It becomes important to efficiently utilize all available screen space and, thus, to be able to detach certain views from the main window and move them around, e.g to an alternate display. However, most modern, web-based tools no longer support detachable views.
Theia as a platform aims to provide adopters with full freedom in terms of how they design their user experience. As a consequence, with its most recent release, Theia introduced experimental support for detaching web views, as well as the standard terminal views. Further types of views can be made detachable by adopters if they decide to explicitly support this feature.
This first of a kind support for detachable windows in a web-based tool is another great example of how well open source collaboration works in Theia. The feature was initially investigated by Ericsson and EclipseSource. Based on the results of this investigation, STMicroelectronics took over the work with some help from Arm and enabled the support for web views and the terminal view.
Congratulations to all participants, well earned!
The Cloud DevTools Working Group provides a vendor-neutral ecosystem of open-source projects focused on defining, implementing and promoting best-in-class web and cloud-based development tools. It is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, current members of the group include Ericsson, IBM, Obeo, RedHat, SAP, AMD, Arm, EclipseSource, Renesas, STMicroelectronics and TypeFox.
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.