Adopting Debug Adapter Protocol in Eclipse IDE: netcoredbg (.NET debugger) case study | ECE 2018
2EclipseCon Europe 2018
Ludwigsburg, Germany · October 23 - 25, 2018
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2018
Speaker(s):
Mickael Istria (Red Hat Inc.)
Jonah Graham
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2018/sessions/adopting-debug-adapter-protocol-eclipse-ide-netcoredbg-net-debugger-case-study
While the Language Server Protocol (LSP) has quickly become an industry standard in the devtools domain and Eclipse IDE promptly got support for it with the Eclipse LSP4J and LSP4E projects, LSP is only targetting the code edition activity. However, code edition is just one activity amongst others for a developer, and some would argue that it's not the main use-case that justifies usage of an IDE over a simple text editor.
One of the most important activity (where IDEs are usually better than other tools) for a developer is debugging: watching a program run, digging hints of what could be wrong, experimenting things against the running application... Similarly to the Language Server Protocol, as part of Visual Studio Code, a JSON-based language and tool agnostic protocol was created to support typical debug interactions and facilitate the binding of a devtool with a debugger. Eclipse LSP4J and LSP4E enabled in early 2018 support for this Debug Adapter Protocol in Eclipse IDE.
Eclipse aCute, providing an IDE for C# and .NET Core, managed to use this Debug Adapter Protocol and the existing integrations with Eclipse IDE to relatively easily and quickly integrate support for netcoredbg, an open-source debugger for .NET Core.
In this presentation, we'll explain how the Debug Adapter Protocol works, how LSP4J can be used to support it in any Java application (either a debugger or a client), how LSP4E can be used to support it out-of-the-box in Eclipse IDE, and we'll use aCute example to show how plugin providers can extend LSP4E and provide the final steps of a good and simple UX.