Closed, proprietary AI stacks are reshaping developer tools: often at the expense of transparency, portability, and control.
Eclipse Theia takes a different route: a fully open, extensible platform you can inspect, adapt, and deploy on your own terms, whether on the desktop or in the cloud.
With Theia, you own your development environment. You choose how it’s extended, which models power its AI features, and where your code and data live. In a moment where open governance and technical flexibility matter more than ever, Theia offers a foundation that developers and organizations can truly trust.
TheiaCon 2025 is where this vision comes to life: through technical talks, live demos, and shared lessons from those building the next generation of tools.
The Call for Proposals (CFP) is now open, and we’re looking for talks that bring real engineering stories: architectures that work, lessons learned from the field, performance data, and code others can build on.
If you’re working with Eclipse Theia, the Theia IDE, or Theia AI, this is your moment to share your experience and shape the future of open developer tools.
👉 Submit your proposal today: https://www.eclipse.org/events/2025/theiacon/
Why Speak at TheiaCon?
- Advance the state of the art: share patterns, benchmarks, and caveats that others can reproduce and adapt.
- Influence the roadmap: the most impactful talks surface real-world needs that evolve into platform features.
- Build the open dev-tools ecosystem: help teams choose openness over lock-in by showing data, diffs, and trade-offs that matter.
- Connect with peers: from contributors to adopters, you’ll meet the people shaping the tools you rely on.
What We’re Looking For
We welcome deep dives, demos, and case studies from across the Theia ecosystem. Here are some topic areas to inspire your proposal.
1. Theia Platform: Architecture & Extensions
The Eclipse Theia platform is a professional-grade IDE framework, modular, extensible, and adaptable to desktop or cloud.
Talks could explore:
- Extension model & APIs – How you’ve built and structured custom extensions, managed dependencies, and optimized lifecycle events.
- Language tooling – Integrating LSP/DAP servers, handling multi-language workspaces, and implementing advanced code actions.
- UI/UX customization – Custom views, virtualized trees and lists, diff editors, theming, and accessibility adaptations.
- Workspace & filesystem providers – Virtual FS layers, remote mounts, syncing offline/online workspaces, handling large monorepos.
- SCM & tasks – Multi-repo workflows, task runners, terminal integrations, and build tool wiring (Maven, Gradle, npm, Bazel).
- Performance & observability – Profiling extension cost, tuning render pipelines, setting up telemetry, and catching regressions early.
2. Cloud-Native Theia: Deployment & Scale
Theia’s architecture makes it ideal for cloud-based environments. Sessions could cover:
- Deployment patterns – Single-tenant vs. multi-tenant setups, ephemeral workspaces, and auto-scaling strategies.
- Kubernetes & containers – Layered images, preloading strategies, storage classes, and network policy design.
- Remote development – SSH bridges, workspace factories, Devfile/Compose-based flows, and secrets management.
- Enterprise concerns – Single Sign-On, policy enforcement, auditing, compliance, and air-gapped/offline deployments.
3. Theia IDE: AI-Powered and Ready to Use
Theia IDE is the open, production-ready IDE that builds on Theia’s foundation — now with AI features built-in. Topics could include:
- Feature deep dives – Debugging, testing, project management, extension compatibility, and quality gates.
- Hardening for production – Update channels, signed builds, policy packs, and extension whitelists/blacklists.
- Customization stories – Using Theia IDE as a base to create a domain-specific IDE with your own features and guardrails.
4. Theia AI: AI-Native Tools Without Lock-In
Theia AI is the open source framework for embedding AI-native capabilities into Theia-based tools. Potential topics:
- Model adapters & providers – Swapping between LLM backends (open/commercial), on-prem inference, GPU sizing, and streaming vs. batch.
- Conversation UI & tool integration – Designing agent/tool-calling workflows, deterministic fallbacks, and evaluation harnesses.
- Context systems – Building embeddings/RAG pipelines, project graph indexes, code-aware chunking, and symbol stores.
- Safety & privacy – Prompt/response filtering, zero-retention configs, and audit logging.
- Domain-specific agents – Assistants for refactoring, migration, incident response, or compliance...
5. Migration & Adoption Case Studies
There’s huge value in real-world stories. Examples include:
- Migrating from bespoke IDEs or VS Code workbenches – What changed, what broke, how you fixed it.
- Latency budgets & SLAs – How you set and met targets, tracing methods, and lessons learned.
- Total cost of ownership – Infrastructure, licensing, support, and training, numbers & data.
6. Privacy, Security & Strategic Topics (Technical at the Core)
Even strategic sessions should be rooted in technical reality. Possible angles:
- Data residency & model choice – Architectures for regulated industries.
- Open governance & sustainability – Why neutrality matters for long-term planning.
- Risk modeling – Threat surfaces in AI-native IDEs, supply-chain security, and extension validation.
📢 The CFP is Open! We’re Waiting for Your Proposal
Whether you’re hacking on performance optimizations, integrating AI agents, deploying Theia at scale, or steering tooling strategy for your org, TheiaCon 2025 is your stage.
Bring your code, your lessons learned, your successes and your failures. The community will be stronger for it.
Submit your talk now → https://www.eclipse.org/events/2025/theiacon/
