A Vision for Flexible GLSP-Based Web Modeling 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 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.