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Eclipse Wild Web Developer

Thursday, June 28, 2018 - 06:35 by Mickael Istria
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.
Parent Project
Proposal State
Created
Background

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.

Scope

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.

Description

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.

Why Here?

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.

Future Work

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

* ...

Project Scheduling

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.

Initial Contribution

Intiial contribution from https://github.com/mickaelistria/eclipse-bluesky contains:

* rich CSS edition using Generic Editor, TM4E and a TextMate grammar, and LSP4E and the VSCode CSS Language Server (included)

* rich HTML edition using Generic Editor, TM4E and a TextMate grammar, and LSP4E and the VSCode HTML Language Server (included)

* rich JSon edition using Generic Editor, TM4E and a TextMate grammar, and LSP4E and the VSCode JSon Language Server (included)

* rich JavaScript edition using Generic Editor, TM4E and a TextMate grammar, and LSP4E and the SourceGraph's Javascript-typescript Language Server (included)

* rich TypeScript edition using Generic Editor, TM4E and a TextMate grammar, and LSP4E and the SourceGraph's Javascript-typescript Language Server (included)

* Debug support for JavaScript re-using JSDT's node debugger integration

Source Repository Type

I'm currently using this and only problem we have is HTML files does not have intelisence for anuguler sysntaxes.Can we get it in future.

I added WWD through the Eclipse Marketplace on my Windows x64 version of Eclipse IDE for Java Developers, 2020-06. I guess it works, but it sure doesn't integrate like JSDT did.

I'm not thrilled with WWD since the first thing I tried to do is comment a line in JavaScript using Ctrl+/ and it summons a dropdown of keyword and available function choices. Ctrl+. does the same thing, and feels more appropriate, so what's the deal?  Want to change the keyboard shortcuts? Too bad. There's nothing under the Keys preference that has anything to do with this kind of TextMate/WWD actions.

Want to change the syntax coloring? Better love what you're given. There is no Syntax Coloring section or anything like it. There's a TextMate set of preferences, but it seems like anything regarding Theme doesn't actually work. Is it because I use DevStyle and the Darkest Dark theme? Who knows.

There's only one WWD preference (XML), which does nothing but tell you "See 'XML Catalogs' for XML catalogs preferences". Thanks? It's also version 0.10.0.etc, which feels like we're being forced to test it. Overall I'm pretty disappointed, especially since Eclipse just automatically upgraded itself from 2020-03 to 2020-06 and now I'm stuck with this. Boo to you on this move, Eclipse