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/**
* Copyright (c) 2020 Eclipse Foundation.
*
* This program and the accompanying materials are made
* available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0
* which is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0/
*
* Contributors:
* Eric Poirier (Eclipse Foundation) - Initial implementation
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: EPL-2.0
*/
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<h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>
<p>
After three years of hard work and several high-profile production deployments,<a
href="https://theia-ide.org/"
> Eclipse Theia</a> 1.0 will be released on March 31. The technology is mature, stable, and ready
for anyone and everyone to use as a foundation for their custom cloud or desktop integrated
development environment (IDE).
</p>
<p>
The framework that Theia provides is the natural evolution of open source desktop IDE platforms,
such as the<a href="https://www.eclipse.org/eclipseide/"> Eclipse IDE</a>. With Theia,
corporations and IDE vendors have a single, modern technology stack that can be used to build
development environments for desktops and browsers. And they don&rsquo;t need to make that
decision upfront.
</p>
<h2>Flexibility for Today and Tomorrow</h2>
<p>
Theia gives the global community a next-generation IDE platform that&rsquo;s ideal for meeting
today&rsquo;s needs and for developing future solutions. Because it&rsquo;s open source,
vendor-neutral, and follows the<a href="https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/"> Eclipse
Foundation governance model</a>, you never have to worry about being tied to a particular
vendor&rsquo;s business objectives or roadmap.
</p>
<p>The potential ways of leveraging Theia are as varied as the organizations that adopt
it. Adopters can build commercial tools for resale as well as internal tools that meet specific
engineering requirements.</p>
<p>We have a number of adopters who start by using Theia to build a desktop IDE, but
don&rsquo;t know when, or even whether, they&rsquo;ll need a cloud IDE. But, they know they can
make that move at any time without having to rewrite the source code. Another major corporation
that&rsquo;s adopted Theia has developed a desktop IDE and a cloud version, but are using the
cloud IDE as a playground for experimenting. The long-term goal is to fully replace the Theia
desktop IDE with the cloud version.</p>
<p>The images below illustrate Theia&rsquo;s architectural flexibility.</p>
<p>
<img src="images/4_1.png"/>
</p>
<p>&nbsp;
<p>
<img src="images/4_2.png"/>
</p>
</p>
<p>
<img src="images/4_3.png"/>
</p>
<h2>Proven in Numerous Real-World Scenarios</h2>
<p>Because the architecture is stable and reliable, companies using Theia can be confident
their IDEs won&rsquo;t break due to changes in the underlying code.</p>
<p>Many big-name companies already rely on Theia as the foundational building block for
their IDEs. For example, it&rsquo;s used in the GitHub IDE, which has 130,000 registered users.
It&rsquo;s also used in Google Cloud Shell, which has many more users. SAP, Arm, and Arduino have
also built highly customized IDEs on top of the Theia platform.</p>
<p>
Theia is also integrated into<a href="https://www.eclipse.org/che/"> Eclipse Che</a>.
</p>
<h2>Support for Virtual Studio Code Extensions</h2>
<p>Eclipse Theia is the first cloud IDE to support VS Code extensions and bring the same
capabilities and features that local desktop IDEs offer into the cloud.</p>
<p>This is a significant step forward from first-generation cloud IDEs that struggled to
provide state-of-the-art tools support. With these early, sandbox-like IDEs, each company had to
develop its own extensions for the IDE &mdash; if extensions were supported at all. Developing
these extensions requires a huge amount of time, programming effort, and money. And it was
replicated across companies.</p>
<p>As an open source community, we can spread the extension development effort across many
contributors and collectively benefit from the results.</p>
<p>
Theia 1.0 will use the<a href="https://projects.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-open-vsx-registry">
Eclipse Open VSX Registry</a> as its default registry. The extensions available in this free
marketplace for VS Code extensions can be used in VS Code as well as in Theia. For additional
insight into the rationale behind the registry and its benefits, <a href="1.php">read the
accompanying article</a> in this month&rsquo;s newsletter.
</p>
<h2>A Full-Featured Development Environment</h2>
<p>With Theia&rsquo;s full-featured development environment, you can do things that
aren&rsquo;t possible in other IDEs. For example, you can:</p>
<ul>
<li>Click a button and start coding in the way you can in GitHub</li>
<li>Create and use as many workspaces as you want in parallel</li>
<li>Start with fresh environments, use them, then discard them at any time</li>
</ul>
<p>These capabilities are possible because Theia provides continuous integration and
brings serverless, ephemeral concepts to development environments. The screen capture below shows
the Theia development environment.</p>
<p>
<img src="images/4_4.png"/>
</p>
<h2>Get Started With Theia</h2>
<p>We invite all users, adopters, and contributors to try Theia 1.0 and to build
extensions. When you work on the Theia project, you can actually use Theia to develop Theia, which
is really cool and super-convenient.</p>
<p>
To get started,<a href="https://theia-ide.org/"> visit the Theia website</a>. You&rsquo;ll find
tutorials backed up with code, examples, documentation, and easy ways to start leveraging Theia in
a variety of programming languages.
</p>
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<h3>About the Author</h3>
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src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2020/march/images/sven.png" alt="<?php print $pageAuthor; ?>"
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