A Vision for Flexibile GLSP-based Web Modeling Tools

TL;DR

This paper envisions more flexible web-based modeling tools using the GLSP framework, aiming to bridge research and industrial practice by leveraging web technologies for enhanced user experience and deployment.

Contribution

It presents a vision for flexible GLSP-based web modeling tools based on practical experiences, encouraging innovation and bridging the gap between prototypes and industrial applications.

Findings

Web-based modeling tools offer increased flexibility and accessibility.

GLSP framework enables integration with popular IDEs.

Potential to bridge research prototypes and industrial tools.

Abstract

In the past decade, the modeling community has produced many feature-rich modeling editors and tool prototypes not only for modeling standards but particularly also for many domain-specific languages. More recently, however, web-based modeling tools have started to become increasingly popular for visualizing and editing models adhering to such languages in the industry. This new generation of modeling tools is built with web technologies and offers much more flexibility when it comes to their user experience, accessibility, reuse, and deployment options. One of the technologies behind this new generation of tools is the Graphical Language Server Platform (GLSP), an open-source client-server framework hosted under the Eclipse foundation, which allows tool providers to build modern diagram editors for modeling tools that run in the browser or can be easily integrated into IDEs such as Eclipse, VS Code, or Eclipse Theia. In this paper, we describe our vision of more flexible modeling tools which is based on our experiences from developing several GLSP-based modeling tools. With that, we aim at sparking a new line of research and innovation in the modeling community for modeling tool development practices and to explore opportunities, advantages, or limitations of web-based modeling tools, as well as bridge the gap between scientific tool prototypes and industrial tools being used in practice.