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A Vision for Flexible GLSP-Based Web Modeling Tools

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The Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 497))

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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 in the industry for visualizing and editing models adhering to such languages. 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 developers 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 Theia. In this paper, we describe our vision for more flexible modeling tools which is based on our experiences from developing several traditional and web-based modeling tools in an industrial and academic context. 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, and limitations of web-based modeling tools, as well as bridge the gap between scientific tool prototypes and industrial tools being used in practice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/eclipse/sprotty.

  2. 2.

    See https://ecdtools.eclipse.org/adopters for companies that agreed to be publicly listed as adopters alongside several more companies who do not want to be named.

  3. 3.

    On Github, the GLSP project has about 180 new discussion threads per year and around 1400 weekly downloads on npmjs.com.

  4. 4.

    https://www.eclipse.org/glsp/gallery/.

  5. 5.

    Semantic Zoom video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBs-fGwq15Y.

  6. 6.

    https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/implementors/tools/.

  7. 7.

    https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/implementors/servers/.

  8. 8.

    https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/implementors/sdks/.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/eclipse-emfcloud/emfcloud-modelserver.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business Informatics Group, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Dominik Bork

  2. EclipseSource, Vienna, Austria

    Philip Langer & Tobias Ortmayr

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  1. Dominik Bork
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  2. Philip Langer
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Correspondence to Dominik Bork .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil

    João Paulo A. Almeida

  2. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Monika Kaczmarek-Heß

  3. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Agnes Koschmider

  4. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Henderik A. Proper

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Bork, D., Langer, P., Ortmayr, T. (2024). A Vision for Flexible GLSP-Based Web Modeling Tools. In: Almeida, J.P.A., Kaczmarek-Heß, M., Koschmider, A., Proper, H.A. (eds) The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. PoEM 2023. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 497. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48583-1_7

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