Developer Resources

[xpomul]

Hi,

is there a documentation, a list of resources, or another set of recommended reading about more advanced development/contribution for Theia? I know the basic documentation about the structure, base technology, DI, frontend-backend, authoring extensions, etc. but I am missing more advanced tooling or hints that can help in diving deeper into the source code or finding my way around.

Coming from the classic (Java) Eclipse Platform and IDE, I am used to the extension registry, OSGi console, Eclipse Spies etc. to introspect the running Eclipse instance (which plugins are started, which services are registered, which code handles a UI contribution/menu item/...). Plus, there are some (undocumented) strategies, such as suspending the VM when a blocking dialog is shown and inspecting the stack of the main thread using the Debug View to get to know which class implements the dialog.

The only thing I have found in Theia so far is the Development Tools, and these seem to concentrate more on Electron and the Runtime (Memory, Network, CPU profiling). Are there also development tools such as the Plugin-View or the Eclipse Spies in Theia, or any other recommended way to check contributions and trace runtime UI back to its implementing code?

Another question that I have: How would I implement and test an extension against an API that is not yet released. I have learned that I can checkout the master branch of the Theia GitHub repo and use yarn link to link the local modules to my extension. But when I try to only link the module providing the updated api, I get build errors. And linking all modules of the GitHub repo to my extension one by one seems a lot of manual work. Is there something to automate this, or another recommended way to do this?

Thanks in advance for any enlightenment!

Best,
Stefan

[msujew]

Hey @xpomul,

we usually just use the "standard" tools for web development, I.e. nodejs (and its associated profilers, debuggers, etc.) and the browser dev tools. AFAIK there are no specific tools for Theia development, on a technical perspective it's just any regular web application (even if running on Electron) and there's quite a lot of tooling out there for general web development.

And linking all modules of the GitHub repo to my extension one by one seems a lot of manual work. Is there something to automate this, or another recommended way to do this?

Instead of using yarn/npm link, I usually use a file:/... link in the package.json. This can be easily done via search & replace for all @theia/* dependencies.