Eclipse Sprotty

Within the scope of Eclipse Sprotty are

• Diagrams to browse and manipulate models in web applications.

• Support for a distributed runtime: share the workload between a client and server.

• An extensible protocol for the communication between client and server

• Diagram authoring facilities: choosing the content of a diagram, arranging diagram elements manually, adding/removing diagram elements, exploring the neighborhood of an element, reconciling a diagram with changes of the underlying model, trigger auto-layout.

• Diagram navigation facilities: open elements, drill up/down, zoom/scroll/center/fit, selection etc.

• Graphical editing facilities: changing the underlying model via the diagram, create/delete/change/customize/connect elements, undo/redo etc.

• Exporting diagrams to a vector-based graphics format.

• Integration with Xtext and LSP to visualize programming artifacts.

• Integration with IDE frontends like Eclipse Theia or Eclipse IDE.

• Integration with auto-layout engines such as the ELK.

Out of scope are

• Auto-layout algorithms for diagrams. We rely on existing frameworks like ELK instead.

• Visualization of huge datasets, like statistical data or timeseries. These are much better handled with frameworks like D3.js. Sprotty focusses on models, i.e. connected elements with fewer properties.

• 3-dimensional visualization.

• Specific model editors/views, e.g. for UML. Of course, Sprotty can be used to implement such a thing, but this should be done in separate downstream projects.

• Tools to author specific diagram editors, like GMF Tooling or Sirius do.