Eclipse GLSP 1.0: Documentation, getting started and examples

In the article, we highlight an area of improvement for the Eclipse GLSP 1.0 release: The enhanced documentation, getting started tutorials and template projects. For a general overview of the GLSP 1.0 release and other notable features, please see the GLSP 1.0 release announcement.

Eclipse GLSP is a framework for efficiently building web-based diagram editors and makes it easy to embed them into Eclipse Theia, VS Code, Eclipse desktop or even an arbitrary web page. Please visit the Eclipse GLSP website to learn more.

Software development is often about features and technical improvements. However, especially for a framework, it is equally important to provide good support for developers adopting a technology. Therefore, a focus of the Eclipse GLSP 1.0 release is to improve documentation and provide examples and templates to get new adopters started easily with the technology.

For 1.0, we have significantly enhanced the API documentation as well as the available documentation on our website, especially the “getting started”. We are very grateful to have received significant contributions in this area, STMicroelectronics even won the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Contributor Award for this. According to OpenHub, GLSP is on a very well documented level!

GLSP on openhub.net

As another entry point, we refined the available examples, which can serve as demonstrators as well as code templates. Furthermore, we provide multiple project templates for different setups of diagram editors based on GLSP. And as GLSP is a visual framework, we also introduced a gallery on our web site to browse and watch a selection of features and example diagrams:

Finally, if you want to use GLSP in a Theia-based tool, we created a Yeoman generator to bootstrap a GLSP diagram editor in Eclipse Theia. It is integrated in the Theia extension generator (see this repository) and allows you to generate a fully integrated example diagram editor.

We hope the extended documentation helps you adopt GLSP for your diagram editor project. You can get even more help using the support options for GLSP. Further, if you have any questions about Eclipse GLSP, please get in touch with us! EclipseSource provides support and training for building custom diagram editors using Eclipse GLSP and for building custom IDEs or tools based on VS Code or Eclipse Theia.