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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the really-open-source dept.

The Eclipse Foundation Releases Eclipse Theia 1.0, a True Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code

Leading open source adopters for Eclipse Theia include ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Gitpod, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox

The Eclipse Foundation, one of the world's largest open source foundations, today announced the release of Theia 1.0, a true open source alternative to Microsoft's popular Visual Studio Code (VS Code) software. Eclipse Theia is an extensible platform to develop multi-language Cloud and Desktop Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) with state-of-the-art web technologies that enable developers, organizations, and vendors to create new, extensible solutions that avoid the fees associated with VS Code. Early contributors and adopters span a broad variety of industries and applications, and include companies like ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Gitpod, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox.

"We are thrilled to see Eclipse Theia deliver on its promise of providing a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating custom and white-labeled developer products," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Visual Studio Code is one of the world's most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience. Congratulations to all the Theia committers and contributors on achieving this milestone."

[...] The most significant differences between Eclipse Theia and VS Code are:

  • Theia's architecture is more modular and allows for significantly more customizations
  • Theia is designed from the ground to run on both Desktop and Cloud
  • Theia is developed under the community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation.

[...] Eclipse Theia is designed to work as a native desktop application as well as in the context of a browser and a remote server. To support both situations with a single source, Theia runs in two separate processes. Those processes are called frontend and backend respectively, and they communicate through JSON-RPC messages over WebSockets or REST APIs over HTTP. In the case of Electron, the backend, as well as the frontend, run locally, while in a remote context the backend would run on a remote host.

Both the frontend and backend processes have their dependency injection (DI) container to which extensions can contribute. Similar to VS Code's online marketplace for code extensions, Eclipse Theia 1.0 also has a marketplace that is available today and, in the spirit of true open source community, allows for even non-VS Code applications to use these extensions.

The Eclipse Foundation has a proven track record of enabling developer-focused open source software collaboration and innovation earned over more than 15 years. Home to critical cloud native open source projects, including Jakarta EE, Eclipse Che, and more, the Foundation's more than 375 collaborative projects have resulted in over 195 million lines of code — a $10 billion shared investment.

It will be nice to see an alternative to VS Code that is really open source.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by progo on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:47AM (1 child)

    by progo (6356) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:47AM (#977963) Homepage

    https://theia-ide.org/ [theia-ide.org]

    I think must of us don't want to read a grey on grey press release.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:22PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:22PM (#978031) Journal

      Thanks for the good link!

      Some press releases definitely should use the exact same pixel color for both the foreground and background colors to avoid seizures and possible brain damage to the reader of the press release. That probably also should apply to some source code as well as press releases.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by progo on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:55AM (2 children)

    by progo (6356) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:55AM (#977964) Homepage

    Very important points:

    • Supports VS Code extensions
    • Supports Language Server protocol

    Language Server protocol allows anyone to develop a metadata server for a source code project in a particular language/platform as a SEPARATE project from an IDE. This concept was created and codified by the VS Code project. That means that with a little bit of work – not a LOT of work – support for your favorite language can be ported from VS Code to Theia and maybe it's already been done.

    • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:20PM

      by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:20PM (#978030)

      Language server protocol also is supported via plugins in many other editors [langserver.org], including emacs, neovim, Sublime Text 3, and IntelliJ.

      --
      If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday April 01 2020, @05:35PM

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @05:35PM (#978107)

      I wonder how much work it'd be to get something like Atmel Studio (which is a wrapper for VS) to run on top of it?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:56AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:56AM (#977965) Journal
    Is Eclipse still a roach motel for bugs in its IDE? I remember a while back (late 2010 maybe?) trying out a development kit for Android (with GUI simulator). It was a pile of crap. I googled around for answers to show stopping bugs, and got a bunch of "Yea, don't bother with that." I was just goofing around, so I didn't look back.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by progo on Wednesday April 01 2020, @07:00AM

      by progo (6356) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @07:00AM (#977966) Homepage

      My favorite bug was the long-long running "source code editors don't support word wrap". For years it was "wontfix -- lol you don't need word wrap".

      They finally realized sometimes people edit prose embedded in code projects, and Eclipse framework gets used for more than creating PROGRAMMING tools.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:54AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:54AM (#978001)

      I've been using Eclipse for Java development for years, though most of my coworkers at the current job prefer IntelliJ. Eclipse is fine for the most part - the git integration in particular is excellent. A few of the features are really counterintuitive, though, like Apache Tomcat configuration management in Eclipse. Both Eclipse and IntelliJ are memory hungry. Also, a tip for anyone on Linux: I haven't tried it in years, but when I last used Eclipse from the Fedora and Ubuntu software repositories it was a disaster. If you only need the plugins available in the repository it's okay, but as soon as you need something else mixing Eclipse packages installed by apt/rpm and Eclipse plugins installed through Eclipse's own builtin package manager leads to crashes galore. If you're running Eclipse on Linux, I strongly recommend just downloading the whole thing from the official Eclipse website. When I did that, it was rock solid.

      With respect to the article, I'm satisfied with Microsoft's answer to the question why the VSCode source is MIT but the VSCode binaries are freeware. That's not really any different than putting a game engine in MIT but putting a game you made with it under a different license because you own the copyright to the artwork and media files in it. I hate Microsoft at least as much as the next person, and I'll give Theia a spin because I think tech industry monocultures are terrible even when the underlying technology is open source.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:11PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:11PM (#978050) Journal

        Similar experience here. I've been using Eclipse for many years for Java. It mostly just works. There were a few bad years in there.

        Ditto about Apache Tomcat configuration. Once you know how to follow the right pointy-clicky maze of dialog boxes, it's quite easy to do. (Any Windows user should be familiar with being trapped in a maze of pointy-clicky dialogs.)

        I strongly recommend just downloading the whole thing from the official Eclipse website. When I did that, it was rock solid.

        Yes, that! But not only on Linux, also on Windows.

        On Linux (at home, personal projects, not a work where Windoze is everywhere) I run Eclipse. I never get it from the distribution. I always download it and set it up myself so that I can control exactly what versions I am running. I do often run multiple independent Eclipse setups on a single desktop. I do this by not "installing" anything on Windows, and not using anything from the distribution on Linux. The eclipse.ini file points to exactly which Java I want to start Eclipse with. Then in Eclipse I may have several different Java's of differing versions (12, 13, 14 etc) from multiple vendors (AdoptOpenJDK, Azul Zulu, Red Hat, Amazon Coretto, Eclipse OpenJ9, SAP, Liberica, etc). So it's quite a matrix of Java runtimes.

        I think tech industry monocultures are terrible even when the underlying technology is open source.

        Yep.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @09:04AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @09:04AM (#977979)

    This literally looks like VS Code, even the icons are the same. What is the supposed difference?

    • (Score: 2) by progo on Wednesday April 01 2020, @09:09PM

      by progo (6356) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @09:09PM (#978160) Homepage

      You can't say your question wasn't addressed in the summary.

      • Theia's architecture is more modular and allows for significantly more customizations
      • Theia is designed from the ground to run on both Desktop and Cloud
      • Theia is developed under the community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation.
  • (Score: 5, Funny) by corey on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:12AM (7 children)

    by corey (2202) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:12AM (#977993)

    Interesting. Guys in my team today were complaining to me that they need more MSDN licences for VStudio. They cost a fair bit so I was suggesting they run Linux in a VM and use gcc. Didn't seem to go down well.

    I had another conversation later with one, saying I was designing an auto off timer with a 555 timer for my daughter's night light. The dude goes "oh I'd just chuck in a micro".

    Kids these days.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:18PM (6 children)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:18PM (#978053) Journal

      One day you won't need a 555 timer.

      It will be the Arduino blink sketch. Running on an emulated Arduino written in Python. The Python will be running on Java's GraalVM. That will in turn be running on Linux -- on an emulated PC -- written in JavaScript (yes really) on NodeJS.

      The whole thing will be packaged together in an SOT-23 package, [wikipedia.org] with only 3 leads, and will cost you 5 cents. It will be the only common solution available and widely in use having replaced the ancient 555.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Acabatag on Wednesday April 01 2020, @08:38PM (5 children)

        by Acabatag (2885) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @08:38PM (#978150)

        There is an 8 pin PIC embedded controller that I would drop in anywhere a 555 timer would be used in the old days. It has a built in RC clock, so you can use it in place of the 555 timer and not need RC components and what-not. Plus it's nice to have a '555 timer' that you can field configure by using one of it's pins as an RS-232 port. Also this is a 50 cent part even in low quantities (PIC10F202).

        And if you really do want to stay analog, anything you can do poorly with an ancient kludge like the 555, you can do better with any dual opamp, say an LM358. The 555 has been reviled for things like the power line spikes it induces for generations.

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 01 2020, @09:51PM (1 child)

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @09:51PM (#978167) Journal

          I am reminded of a journal entry [soylentnews.org] I made once.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
          • (Score: 2) by corey on Friday April 03 2020, @11:47AM

            by corey (2202) on Friday April 03 2020, @11:47AM (#978661)

            Thank you Danny for they laugh, great post. I even showed it to some of my EE's for some isolated covid-19 laughs.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:27PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @02:27PM (#978304)

          If it is based on PIC, it will randomly stop without a reason. And then what do you need not working MCU. Avr, Arm, Msp, 8051, anything before PIC...

        • (Score: 2) by corey on Thursday April 02 2020, @09:17PM (1 child)

          by corey (2202) on Thursday April 02 2020, @09:17PM (#978454)

          Yeah true, the 555 is just a comparator that is better done with an opamp. But the 555 is so oldskool.

          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 03 2020, @03:34PM

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 03 2020, @03:34PM (#978743) Journal

            Just because it's old doesn't mean it is bad.

            --
            People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:27PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:27PM (#978036)

    This looks like it's just a fork of VS Code with Microsoft's trademarks and services removed. Which, sure, removing their telemetry is probably a good thing. But they're throwing some serious shade at Microsoft here when VS Code's binary license is basically the same as Red Hat.

    Seriously, I can't think of any reason this isn't exactly the same as taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux, stripping the trademarks and support hooks, and redistributing it as CentOS. I don't think anybody would suggest that Red Hat is not open source the way Eclipse is claiming VS Code isn't.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:47PM (1 child)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @02:47PM (#978040) Journal

    What we really need to know: is it extensible??

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:25PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 01 2020, @03:25PM (#978058) Journal

      See post by progo above:

      • Supports VS Code extensions
      • Supports Language Server protocol
      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @06:51PM (#978123)

    Electron/web browser for my text editor/IDE? nah. I'll use TAU. https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Tau [gnome.org]

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by dltaylor on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:11PM

    by dltaylor (4693) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:11PM (#978180)

    Last time(s) work pointed me to either VS or Eclipse, I stuck with emacs. I was just more productive.

    Now, when I get a few more drivers built, I think I can stop using Windows or Linux underneath it.

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