Web-Based Tools and the Future of AI in IDEs

There’s a lot to look forward to at EclipseCon 2023: the Community Day, tons of talks, plenty of networking opportunities, and much more. 

And, of course, we’ll be kicking off the presentations with our keynote speeches. We caught up with Jonas Helming of EclipseSource and Sonja Liénard of SAP to learn more about their keynotes. Here’s what they had to say.

The Eclipse Foundation and Web-Based Tools with Jonas Helming

My talk is going to cover some of the recent achievements of web-based tools, their adoption, and, particularly, what future opportunities they’re going to open up. Web-based tools have quickly moved from a trend to being the de-facto standard for implementing tools and IDEs.

Over the past two decades, the Eclipse ecosystem has built robust and stable desktop technologies, and, over the past five to seven years, they’ve done the same with web-based tools. 

There are a bunch of very exciting projects in the Foundation right now that are building the fundamental technologies needed to enable the next steps of innovation in web-based tools. Here are just a few:

Eclipse Theia

Theia is the next generation of the Eclipse Platform for IDEs and Tools. It is a flexible and extensible cloud & desktop tool platform based on modern, state-of-the-art web technologies. As such, Theia is the backbone for many innovations in the area of web-based tools in the Eclipse community. With Theia Cloud you can run every Theia application online with ease.

Eclipse CDT Cloud

In some ways, this is the successor to Eclipse CDT. It’s a web-based technology for building tools for domain-specific languages. Eclipse CDT Cloud is a key enabler for web-based development because it gives you the ability to program code for embedded devices that aren’t physically in your possession. 

Eclipse Open VSX

Web-based tools, just like desktop tools, rely on code extensions to enhance their flexibility and utility. The Open VSX Marketplace provides an open alternative to Microsoft’s VS Code Marketplace, which is crucial for any developer working on any open source tools on the desktop or the web.

Eclipse GLSP

This is the Eclipse Graphical Language Server Platform, which enables developers of web-based tools to create diagrams within them. Because it’s based natively in the browser, it opens up a lot of opportunities in terms of visualization, animation, and so on, making it much easier to build attractive and intuitive diagrams. 

Eclipse EMF Cloud

This is the web version of the Eclipse Modeling Framework, which is a crucial platform for web-based tools. In essence, it provides an umbrella for technologies used to build data-driven tools and solutions for managing the underlying data models. 

Eclipse Langium

This is a relatively new project to the Eclipse Foundation, having been originally developed outside of it. It solves a very similar problem to what Eclipse Xtext used to solve. It significantly reduces the effort involved in building tools for domain-specific languages. And it uses a web-based technology stack which, combined with the fact that it’s written in TypeScript, makes it very easy to deploy in the cloud.

There’s already been a great deal accomplished with web-based tools. But there remain both challenges to overcome and opportunities that have yet to be seized. I’ll be covering all three of these aspects of the web-based tool conversation in my EclipseCon keynote talk. Don’t miss it!

Challenge Accepted: Innovations Around Us and Our Vision for Mind-Blowing IDEs with Sonja Liénard

My talk will take you on a journey through the history of our Eclipse IDE. In addition to that, it will show that technology innovations are continuously approaching, while at the same time we can observe big bang events like generative AI (Gen AI). I will also discuss how Gen AI is already changing the way developers work and what it means for IDEs overall during this talk. 

There’s still plenty of work to be done in setting the stage for Gen AI integration into IDEs. Some of it is technical, and some of it is about mindset changes and education. 

But there is more to be done to offer state-of-the-art and mind-blowing IDEs that is not related to Gen AI at all. 

The Architecture Is There

The good thing is that the architecture for integrating Gen AI into our IDE is there.  

The crucial step is being able to train the AI. You need a huge code base for this, and this can be hard to come by. In SAP’s case, our proprietary coding language ABAP has the challenge because nearly all ABAP code is IP protected. Thus, the currently available LLMs have not been fully trained on ABAP, especially on ABAP Cloud. But in the case of other languages like Java or C++, there’s a huge code base and information available that was used to train LLMs. That is an advantage for the open source space.

Visionary Leaders Needed

I’m not sure how much time we have left to integrate Gen AI into our IDE or do all the other things needed, but the short version is that it might be running out faster than expected. The reality is that we need the whole community to pull together, and we need a clear vision from some leaders in the community on what we need for our IDEs. 

IDE Needs to Be Approachable

One critical aspect of our ongoing efforts within the Eclipse IDE ecosystem revolves around the work being done by the Eclipse IDE Working Group to enhance and modernize the user interface. 

It’s important that we recognize that the UI is the face of our IDE, much like the front door of your house. Regardless of how impressive the inside may be, people are unlikely to step inside if the exterior appears unattractive or unwelcoming. With all this in mind, we’re working hard to make things simpler and more user-friendly, so you only must deal with the tools and features you really need. 

The underlying technology of Eclipse IDE is powerful and strong. So, the question is why it is not the most famous IDE in direct comparison with other IDEs anymore? It’s most probably because of the UI and not about the feature scope or overall technology. Additionally, the kind of tricky installation as well as the overall performance is often raised as an issue by our customers. 

AI Offers Huge Potential Value

If we as a community can do the necessary work, Gen AI, as well as the UI refresh can add a lot of value to our IDE. Gen AI, as well as user-friendly UIs will safeguard our future, and it will add a lot of value to the overall developer efficiency. In addition to that, the overall contributions of all active members of the Eclipse IDE Working Group are crucial for the IDEs future. We’re all in it together.

If you’re interested in getting involved and helping the Eclipse IDE Working Group realize this vision, check us out and get involved. 

And don’t miss my EclipseCon keynote address, where I’ll get into the story of how we got here and how we can continue to build mind-blowing IDEs.