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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: 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.
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  • (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.