Because of technical reasons (reimplementation of parsers mostly) and strategical priorities (Java EE), Eclipse IDE and the WebTools project have hard time catching up with innovation in the front-end Web development world. As a result, several editors for typical web languages (CSS, HTML, JavaScript...) shipped in the Simultaneous Release are of low quality compared to the state of the domain and competiting IDEs.
Eclipse Wild Web Developer provides a rich development experience for Web development in Eclipse IDE, including editing assistance, debugging and other features that ease development of web applications.
Eclipse Wild Web Developer relies on existing mainstream and maintained components to provide the language smartness, over popular configuration files like TextMate and protocols like Language Server Protocol or Debug Adapter Protocol; and may rely on some valuable pieces of Eclipse WebTools.
But Eclipse Wild Web Developer is not meant to be a project where we (re)implement parsers or debuggers; it's only focused on integrating existing components. Any work that deals with plain language or debugger logic should be excluded from Wild Web Developer and directed to the underlying components used by Wild Web Developer.
As such, Eclipse Wild Web Developer won't host specific language server or TextMate grammars and will only consume those artifacts produced by other projects.
Eclipse Wild Web Developer integrates existing artifacts like TextMate grammars and Language Servers to provide a rich development experience to Web developers using typical programming languages for the Web (CSS, HTML, JSon, JavaScript, TypeScript...).
Eclipse Wild Web Developer is about integrating existing technologies for those languages more than creating more specific language smartness.
Eclipse Wild Web Developer deeply integrates with Eclipse IDE and several related projects. It also targets a wide audience of Web developers.
We believe contributing Wild Web Develoepr (formerly BlueSky) to Eclipse.org will allow Eclipse IDE to provide some better quality support for Web technologies with a low maintenance cost. We also think that the interest in Wild Web Developer from the Eclipse ecosystem is going to be big enough to make it worth enforcing top-quality governance by embracing the Eclipse Development Process.
While the code authored in BlueSky -to become Eclipse Wild Web Developer- (the integration parts) are EPLv2; the reused artifacts (TextMate grammars, language servers...) are under MIT license. Starting the Language Server requires node.js to be installed on user's machine.
The project will release a 0.1.0 version as soon as it's migrated to Eclipse.org.
The project would then release minor updates whenever one of the included language servers provides interesting updates.
Future work will involve:
* typical bugfixes and minor improvements in code and UI
* Adoption of newer Eclipse Platform/TM4E/LSP4E when they release
* Adoption of newer language servers and textmate grammars
* (Probably) adoption of debuggers conforming ot the Debug Adapter Protocol
* ...