The Eclipse Theia Update 2022

It has been an amazing year for Eclipse Theia, the next-gen Eclipse platform for building tools and IDEs. 2022 brought many new adopters and contributors, as well as numerous improvements and new features. Let’s look back at an exciting year and summarize the highlights!

You are new to Eclipse Theia? Please refer to our introduction of Theia and visit the Theia website.

We recently gave a talk at TheiaCon 2022 about the highlights for Eclipse Theia in 2022. In case you missed it, no worries, you can watch a recording below:

Speaking of TheiaCon 2022, it was definitely a highlight of the year 2022 and with over 320 participants it was a huge success. You can find  the recordings of all TheiaCon 2022 talks  on Youtube.

Another highlight for Theia in 2022 was definitely the first community release of Eclipse Theia. In addition to the regular monthly releases, community releases are published every three months and provide several benefits for adopters and integrating technologies. See this description about the idea of community releases in general and the announcement of the first Eclipse Theia community release 2022-09 for more details.

To celebrate the first community release, the Eclipse CloudDev Tools working group recorded a very nice video featuring various people of Theia’s vibrant community!

The next community release will be published in February, we have shifted the schedule a bit to avoid the Christmas break this year and for future years.

2022 was a very active year for the Theia development team, too. The platform has been improved a lot and many excellent features have been added. Our top three picks in terms of features are:

• Support for a configurable toolbar
• Support for detachable view
• The memory inspector

However, Theia is not only about end-user visible features. As a platform, it allows adopters to build their own tools and IDEs. Therefore many improvements are targeted at adopters. Our top three picks in this area are:

• Improved performance for file access (by factor 10)
• Improved CLI for dependency management
• Support for Playwright end-to-end tests

Please see the following list of all Eclipse Theia release announcements in 2022 to find out  more details on the numerous features and improvements in 2022:

• Theia 1.22 (January)
• Theia 1.23 (February)
• Theia 1.24 (March)
• Theia 1.25 (April)
• Theia 1.26 (May)
• Theia 1.27 (June)
• Theia 1.28 (July)
• Theia 1.29 (August)
• Theia 1.30 (September)
• Theia 1.31 (October)
• Theia 1.32 (November)

In 2022, Theia also achieved a significant leap in supporting the VS Code extension API. As you might know, Theia can host regular VS Code extensions. VS Code was very active in 2022 adding new API for extensions. As you can see in the following chart, Theia is rapidly catching up with this fast pace, and is close to fully supporting VS Code API up to 1.64.

Percentage of supported VS Code extension API over time (including stubbed API)

Another leap was achieved in terms of documentation. As you can see in the following analysis, the Theia source code is well commented and we have significantly increased the available documentation on the Theia website.

The analysis also shows that Theia is a very active project with a mature code base. With over 100 contributors from various companies, Theia deserves to be the next generation of Eclipse.

Theia Adopter and Contributors

So 2022 was a very exciting year for Eclipse Theia. We are looking forward to 2023 and thank all adopters and contributors! And finally, last but not least, Theia also celebrated its 5th anniversary in 2022!

If you are interested in building custom tools or IDEs based on Eclipse Theia, EclipseSource provides consulting and implementation services for Eclipse Theia, as well as for web-based tools in general. Furthermore, if you would like to extend Theia with new platform features, EclipseSource provides sponsored development for Theia, too. Get in contact with us, to discuss your use case!