Diagram Editors Boosted: Collaborative, Testable and Accessible diagrams with Eclipse GLSP
0Presented at EclipseCon 2023 in Ludwigsburg, Germany by Philip Langer (EclipseSource) and Dominik Bork (TU Wien).
Do plain old diagram editors that are cumbersome to develop, hard to test and clumsy to use put you off? Us too! With Eclipse GLSP, however, such editors belong to the past. Join us for a talk on the recent innovations from the community in the Eclipse GLSP universe and learn how to build modern web-based diagram editors for your tools with ease!
Alongside other great additions to the recent GLSP 2.0 release, we will in particular explore three key areas of innovation:
Synchronous Diagram Editing: With its novel VS Code Live Share integration, Eclipse GLSP now provides real-time collaboration capabilities, allowing multiple users to work on the same diagram simultaneously, fostering seamless teamwork and boosting productivity.
Testability of diagram editor: While GLSP’s API was designed to foster unit testing from the start, testing entire user-flows has always been a challenge in all diagram frameworks. Therefore, a novel page object model based on Playwright for any GLSP-based editor has been introduced, which makes end-to-end testing a breeze.
Accessibility of diagram editors: Many improvements landed in GLSP to make diagram editors more efficient to use. In particular, keyboard-oriented diagram navigation and editing tools, as well as metadata in diagrams, enable an empowering experience for all users.
In this talk, we will not only demonstrate new features, but also delve into the underlying technologies, discuss best practices, and show how they can be used to improve your existing or new diagram editor.