About this talk
This talk provides an in-depth update on the Thea project, a next-generation tool platform developed within the Eclipse ecosystem. The speakers, Yonas Helming and Thomas Ma, introduce Thea as a versatile platform that enables the creation of customized tools and integrated development environments (IDEs) across various domains, including coding tools and domain-specific applications. Key components of Thea include Thea AI, which supports AI features in tools, and the Thea IDE, which serves as a ready-to-use coding environment. They highlight significant advancements over the past year, notably an increase in contributions and the implementation of new features, particularly in AI integration. The session includes live demonstrations of Thea IDE and tools built using Thea, showcasing its modularity and flexibility in design. The talk emphasizes community involvement and encourages engagement through collaboration and contributions to aid project evolution.
Full transcript
Hello and welcome to our afternoon talk. Um I would like to introduce Thomas Ma. I'm Jonas Helming. Um Thomas is from Castle Rich. I'm from Eclipse Source. We are both building tools and IDEs for a living. And today we are talking both in our role as Thea Project Kodits. And we would like to give you an update news from the next generation tool platform at Eclipse. For
the next 35 minutes or so, we want to tell you uh what Thea is. We start with that um and what happened approximately one year back. Um we had this talk um several times before at OCX and previously Eclipse. We typically try to cover exactly one year. So every conference an update now that the OCX is already last OCX is already one and a half years ago.
Um we try to cover everything important since then. All right. Um I will do the start then I will hand over to Thomas and I will do the outro again. So let's get started. Um now I would like to talk with a quick introduction on what what Eclipse Thea actually is just for those of you who have not heard about it or are maybe confused about the
different um terms that out there thea the project thea IDE thea the platform and so on. So just that we are all on the same page one slide of introduction and then we directly dive into the news. All right. What is Thea? Um, Thea would be not a good Eclipse project if we wouldn't have several meanings for the same term. We have a long tradition in confusing
adopters and users and in the project we do the same. Um, thea actually consists of um several building blocks. Um, the most important ones currently are number one thea platform. Um, this exists since 2017. That was the first building block. Um and it is a platform to build tools and IDEs. And what that means is if you want to build a coding tool uh but also for
other domains, a domain specific tool for hardware engineering, for configuration artifacts, for managing test data, even for constructing railways or analyzing finance data. Um what I mean with a tool is typically a workbench for domain experts where they do some more complex stuff, not a classical business application. So if you have such a use case or you have a classic coding use case um for example you
uh develop a programming language or you do something like Arduino um where you want to support your users to program for a certain type of hardware um you you want to develop a tool and if you do so it would be a lot of effort if you just start from scratch. So thea is a platform that helps you with that. It provides you a lot of building
blocks that you can reuse. Uh for example, a workspace concept, a file explorer, a code editor and in recent time of course also AI support. So in a sense it's kind of a modern version of the Eclipse platform that has served this purpose for many many years. The second building block that exists since two years um and as shown in the diagram is a subcomponent of the
platform um is called Thea AI. Now that is a sub part of the framework that is specifically meant for building AI tools uh and ids or to phrase it differently AI support into your tools and ids. So what's in there is a lot of building blocks that you need if you want to build AI features like LLM communication prompt management anic framework tool calls MCP skills and
so on. So this is all in the AI. Um two more building blocks. Um the first two things are frameworks. So you can use them as frameworks to build your own tools. But the project um since four years I think also publishes a downloadable product that is ready to go that is prepackaged that is called the thea IDE. Um this is a um product an open product
based on the thea platform for coding. So you can just download that and use that as an end user. Uh it serves several purposes. One is just a nice open alternative to other coding environments. Um but also it kind of demonstrate demonstrates all the features of the platform well because it's pretty powerful tool. So everything that you see in the AI you can use similarly for your
own tools too. And last but not least um since the existence of thea AI um the project has also heavily extended the thea IDE with um features for AI coding. There's for example an AI coding agent called thea coder chat all the tools that you need for AI coding. So you can use the thea ID as an AI coding environment too. Now these are uh the major
four uh building blocks. What's very important to note um when we show something like a demonstration we often show the thea ID because it's kind of the standard tool. But what you should really keep in mind the main purpose of the platform is that you build your own tool based on this. And I'm happy to say in this uh presentation we actually show you examples of other
companies that have done this and you can actually uh look at look at the results. All right. Now um to sorry let me stop this. Um so now to give you an impression how that actually looks like because we we don't just want to show you slides. Um I want to show a very quick demonstration of the thea IDE but also a tool um that is built
on the IDE that you get an impression on how that looks like. So now what we see here that's the thea IDE um as you can see it looks like a standard ID very similar to VS code. The reason for that is for the standard IDE we kind of match the same usability concept as in VS code. There are some differentiation for example we support a toolbar
and some others but the main [snorts] thing looks very similar. So we have a code editor in the middle um which is by the way also the same that is embedded into VS code. We have for example here file explorer a git view a debug view and so on. And what's noteworthy here we have a chat that is native the AI. Um this is where you could
communicate with agents ask them to do something but we also have overlays. Um for example here you could also ask AI and in if you build your own tool basically you can really change that completely. Uh I will show you that in a second. Um it is worth noting though that um with sorry go here. Oh have to press escape. Um because the thea platform is web-
based so it's not based on dep desktop technologies but based on typescript react and so on. You can also run it online and that's literally possible um based on the same code base. Um, and to demonstrate that, uh, I go to the Thea homepage where we host an online demo, uh, of the Thea ID. So, if I click here, um, I can now launch the same tool
that I've just shown you as a desktop application. Um, but this time the back end of this application runs on a Kubernetes cluster somewhere in the cloud. And I just use my browser uh to look at that. So, this is the exact same tool now running in the browser. The reason why I show you that is for many companies that build tool this is in a very
interesting um migration path. They have an existing desktop tool. They want to someway go to the cloud. Um and if you use thea you can uh switch to web technologies first. You can still deploy on the desktop for example to not shock your users but with the same codebase you can also deploy in the cloud and then basically just work with UL and no installation uh is
necessary anymore. Now, I promised you to show you a tool that is also based on Thea that doesn't look like the Thea IDE. And um the timing was pretty perfect. In March, so one month ago, um ST Micro Electronics, that's a large hardware vendor. Uh they published their new tool uh called Cube MX2. Um and that's their new uh configuration tool for boards uh including code generation.
So if you work on a hardware project and use um their C5 and future series, this is the standard tool. Um now as you can see this is the tool on screen. This looks nothing like the first tool. It's really completely customstyled and that's uh the power of Thea of the platform. Um Thea doesn't just provide some extension points where you can do foreseen things. The whole
platform is very modular and as we can see here you can very easily exchange the default renders for default elements like the tabs and so on and get to a completely custom UX. Now what can we do here? Let me open a project here. Um you can configure boards um and then generate code. So for example here we see a nice um editor where you configure uh
input port uh port pins and output pins of such a board. I will not go into details because not everybody is a hardware engineer. Um just to show you another uh nice view here we see a clock view um where we have a diagram um it uses web- based rendering so uh it's pretty nice looking and I can do for example things like um highlight all path
um to see what is going in here and now I can say here for example configure that and now I get to another um uh view and here I can see the the preview of the generated code from this configuration and for example if I change something here um again I will not explain the details I see okay these would be the code changes um based on
this configuration change so we see this as clearly is completely different than an IDE it contains some code here although that is there are tools that also don't contain any code and the core message is you're not restricted in the UX so you really have full control and it's very important this is not a fork it just uses standard API to do All right, let me go
um back to my here and start it again. [cough] All right. Now, what we typically did uh in the previous talks like this is we basically looked at all the PRs from the previous year and tried to summarize the most important features. for this talk it was a little bit difficult and the reason for that is this is the project got insanely active um over one year
we had 1,200 um PRs merged um from almost 80 contributors and I started to browse them through and I started a list of the most important news it was simply not possible to mention all of them um we will mention some some of them or in particular that Thomas will do that what I did is I um basically used AI to anal ize all PRs um and
generate a work word cloud to see what were the schemes or the areas that we did a lot of changes in and we can see or hopefully you can see a lot of the new features and PRs are obviously related to AI which is true for all uh tools out there all tool platforms out there of course AI is the central topic thea is obviously the biggest
one you also see open AIMA and so on that has definitely in the biggest area of development and maybe you watched my demo today in the morning that was fully about AI. So I will not uh mention all the features. I would just give you an overview on what the technology can do for you. Before I do that, I'm also very happy to say that in 2025
uh we the project was also recognized from from the outside world. We won the Kodi 2025 award for the best open-source AI developer tool. um that was given by an independent uh jury. So really happy for that recognition. Thank you. Yeah, applause to the committee. It was not just not only me to all committers. Now quickly, what is thea AI? I mentioned beforehand that's a framework that
you can use to build um AI tools. Now what what does that mean? What kind of framework that is that? Now the lower part, the lower box basically shows you the framework. And keep in mind the framework is really always something that you use um from within a tool. The standard tool that uses thea AI that I showed before is the AI native thea IDE. Uh the
thing that I mainly demonstrated in the morning um and this one already uh contains or hosts several agents. Thea coder is the native agent developed by the project. But in the the ID you can also use other agents like codeex or cloud code and they all basically use thea AI in the background. Um but it is important that the the main purpose of this framework is actually
this. Now if you do so what are the building blocks that you actually benefit from? Uh what are reusable parts? Number one you get a lot of UX components. Um, foremost a chat, a standard chat. That sounds simpler than it is because if you if you have ever built an AI based tool, you start with a simple chat, but then you want to display files, you want
to display tool calls, you want to render something in the chat, you want to configure something and you want to have several sessions in parallel, you want to support forking sessions and so on. So, it gets complex very easily. Um theai provides a standard chat but also smaller elements that you can integrate into existing views. Um you have agent management. Um so you can create your own
agents or integrate existing agents like for example cloud code or codeex. You have prompt management. So to combine several prompts in different variants uh um uh or for example add variables that contain I don't know the current time or something like that. Um we support functions so that agents can interact with other systems for example the file system or any internal system. Um we have an LLM
management. Um we can connect to literally any LLM. Uh we support most of them out of the box. If not you can add your own LLM provider but anthropic open AI um Gemini Lama Llama file hugging face all these standard technologies are already supported. That includes hosted models but also local models. and we um support external technologies that are emerging pretty fast like MCP skills, external agents
and so on. Now to quickly show you an example before I then hand over to Thomas and what it can do with this technology. Um I don't want to show a coding demo again because I've done so in the morning already. Um but I want to show you one demo that I showed in the morning. Um and that's a diagram tool uh which embeds AI. Now what
we see here is a example product based on thea that is actually a modeling tool for autosar for function blocks in autosar. So this is something you could build with thea easily. Um but for this demonstration we integrated an AI agent that can interact with this diagram editor and it can actually modify it. Um, and if I now just hit enter here, what I added here is
a specification of of a system that I want to model. It describes a navigation system for ships in plain text. And now if I hit enter here and everything works well, this custom agent will actually use thea AI and the provided functions to inter to interact with this diagram. And we can see it starts to create function blocks here. Um based on the specification that I provided,
it will be soon done with that. It will then next probably create some import output ports. Um based again on the specification, but of course it will think a lot about this problem first. So it creates input ports. Now the nice thing is um this is still the same diagram that I used manually. So if I wanted to interact with this myself to look at it or
change something, I could still do so. So for example, let me So I could still zoom. I don't want to change something now to not confuse the agent. [snorts] Um and in a second it should create connections now. Um yeah, now it creates connections based on the specification. And the last part would be that it um runs a layout as it has done now. And now it
will take a screenshot send that to the LLM and check whether lay the layout actually makes sense. Um and of course I can interact now with this diagram. I could for example say I don't remove something or what I can do is uh let me uh one sec. What I can for example say is no I didn't want that this one. Um I could for example highlight
a certain path in this in this diagram. Um so I can also ask the agent questions about this diagram because it has a a fundamental understanding. So now it highlights certain inter parts input parts to a certain point. All right. So this was just a quick demo on what's possible with thea AI but this talk is not only about thea AI um but also about other things
that happened in the platform. And with that I would like to hand over to Thomas uh who starts a section besides AI. >> [applause] >> Yeah, as you get from from Yonas's start there, a lot of the innovation this year has been going on in the AI field in Thea. But that's obviously not the only thing that's been going on. Uh lots of debugger improvements have been
coming in. For example, you can debug uh VS Code extensions directly from the IDE. now uh data break points are new and there are really a whole host of uh improvements and bug fixes in the diva area that just make the whole experience more uh better than than it was a year ago. Um a couple of features we got from VS Code like we have a terminal
manager now. Uh there's the three-way merge editor is now available in Thea or the workplace feature has been much expanded. Not sure if we cover everything everything but most of the stuff is is uh now covered. Um we have been migrating from the old phosphors framework to luminal because that is actually supported. The good thing there is for the adopters that was a non-event. We could adopt
all the the breaking changes in in the framework itself. Um we also publish signed ARM builds on the Mac. Now, before you always had to do a little dance to make the Mac actually uh execute the the ARM builds and if you didn't do that, you had to use the Intel build and that was just much slower. And a big feature we brought in uh this year
was uh the availability of preferences in the Thea back end in VS Code. It's only available in the front end, but one of our adopters uh actually had the requirement that they wanted to run CLI commands based on thea. So you need the the preference support available in the back and it's also a good example of how uh Thea reacts to to requests from the adopters because
we don't have a single product that that is interesting to us. As far as process is concerned we keep keeping up with the Joneses. Uh we recently have updated to a new version of the Monaco editor from VS Code. Every month we make sure that the extension API the VS code extension API is compatible with what they have and uh also recently the built-ins have been updated
to the latest. So we keep keeping up with that. Same thing with node and electron uh versions we for node we support the active and I think current long-term support each time. That's a rolling window and we do the equivalent uh for for the electron We've also started uh publishing next releases. What that is basically, somebody correct me if I'm wrong, is that we uh each day
at midnight we build from the the main branch and you can use that as an adopter if you want to build against the latest and greatest. For example, if there is a breaking change coming in coming in and you want to adapt your code uh to that and we're in the process, no uh forgot uh also we're publishing software builds a material now for those who are
not familiar that's transitive list of all the dependencies with data about it and that's useful. Yeah, you correct me if I'm wrong. >> Yeah. Yeah. More or less what you can do with it. uh for example licensing checks if if you have every module in the system you can check if the license is compliant with what you need and also if you have a CD you can
check if you have the exact version of that module that is affected and last but not least that's in the process of being merged we are moving to a new uh build system uh ES build and hopefully for the developers that will make the ID builds much faster as far as the community is concerned. Yonas has also already talked about it. The commits are up year-over-year. The
number of contributors is more or less stable, but we've been able to have more PRs from contributors that are not exactly in in the main core group of of maintainers, which in my book is a good thing. It just makes the whole thing it means we have more people who are uh knowledgeable out about the codebase, right? And we've introduced an AI contribution policy which is quite
simple which means the person is responsible that the PRs are compliant with our with our rules for PRs that they're not like slob right so that's your your responsibility it's always a person responsible and we've also started experimenting with AI reviews there have been discussions but what we're doing now is that we're doing a time boxed evaluation where we enable the feature and then we'll see if
that's actually positive or net negative. The whole thing has been triggered by an increase in in PRs. So that's not all bad either. One misconception we hear a lot is that uh Thea is a a fork of VS Code and there's some truth to it because we use the the Monaco editor from VS Code and we're also compatible with the VS Code extension API. But the difference
as Yonas has hinted that is that thei is made for adoption. It's not made for forking. So you use it as a library not as a as a forkable base and you can remove or replace anything in the system with dependency injection and it's it's made for that. We also have a policy of controlled API evolution. We've seen from projects like the Eclipse project itself that if
you have a very strict non-breaking changes policy that the it's just hard to evolve the system such that it it it remains viable. So what we do is we try very hard not to break the API the internal API uh but if we do uh then we have uh a policy of publishing a breaking change notice and if it's a complicated change we even publish a mic
there's a migration MD document where we describe how you can have adapt your code to the new to the new API. One difference is also that we have open governance. There's not a single single company that that can just do whatever they want. We're an Eclipse project. So there are our are well established rules how we do things but also how you can get into the community
and get influence and get committers on the project etc. And the final one and I think this is a an important one. We're not making money from thea the framework to code. We're making money from adoption. Most of the people in like Yonas and me uh we have success if people adopt the framework and do something with it. And that's so your success is our success. So
you've seen Thea ID in the demo and I've been using Thea ID since summer 2023. I think you were off by one year. Um and I think so should you and there are a couple of of reasons for that. The first is that um it just works. It used to be one of the reasons we introduced the the ID was so that the platform would get more
stable and that is true now. We have every month we have a new release with the newest and greatest and uh the breakage is almost never there. It just works. let me just >> by the way Thomas on the >> that's yeah a younger younger prettier version version of me. [laughter] AI is flattering. [sighs] Anyway, uh the thing is that the it as you've seen it's a
an idea that's very similar to VS Code. So, you'll be right at home, but there are some differences in in AI and I think they're significant because every you control every prompt that's in the system. You can have your own prompt. You can write your own or you can see what what's in there and replace it. And uh also you have complete visibility into what's going in
and out of the IDE. So every every character that's being sent to OpenAI or uh Anthropic, you can see it. You can also see how many tokens you use, etc. So if they ever mischarge you, you can tell them no, not true. And finally, I don't know, for me that matters and maybe to you too, it's a fully open governance and open- source uh IDE, and no
single company can just say they're not interested in it anymore because it's still going to be there. So one thing I've been dealing with a lot in the last uh year or so is uh what I call thea RCP. You all know there are lots of of uh Eclipse RCP applications out there but the framework is 20 25 years old right so it's kind of running into
trouble now first problem is you have to find people who actually know how to program with Eclipse RCP which is not that easy easier if you use web technologies because web technologies are everywhere. Um and second thing is some stuff might just have run out of for example dependencies that are not available anymore for for Java right and uh lots of the new features like we've seen
thea AI or mobile support they're not exactly happening in in the Eclipse framework it's very stable but it's also been around for a long time so if you decide you need to modernize your uh Eclipse RCP application there are a couple of ways you can do that and if your application is just the front end for a database, your best bet is probably just do a web
application. But if you do something that's like an IDE, if you edit uh files in a workspace, if you have like a language that you that you build or other things like moderate applications where you build multiple applications from the same source code, then they can actually offer you I think a lot of uh positive points there. Excuse me. [snorts] And the title of this talk is
uh news about the next generation platform. But honestly, I don't think that's long no longer true. Uh I think they if you want to build a an ID like application today, it's the the current get generation platform. And um why do I say that? Because it's a very stable runtime. It's a very stable API. And it's been proven in in real world large projects to work as
a basis for ID like applications. And you don't have to believe me, you can believe these people who have have actually most of them built real products uh based on thea IDE started a couple of years ago with the Arduino IDE and the ARM which have uh their embedded idees on based on the uh Texas Instrument came out with something Reneas we've seen uh Cubmx 2 from
from SD Micro Electronics EMD is something has a a GPU profiler Sakatoa which has recently came out so and others like Lonte and the list is long and the thing is there might even be more out there but because we're an open source project and it's relatively easy to adopt we don't even know if they if how many there are right [snorts] so what this means for
you is that you can trust thea as a framework to be around because there are large players with lots of money who have a stake in in thea being around in the future. And with that, yas, please. >> Thank you. Um, yeah, about this, I have one uh one more demo, but I will not show it here on on the stage. Um, also in March, Samsung released
a new GPU profiling tool for their Android ecosystem. Um, is pretty nice. If you want to see that, please visit us at our booth. Um, for time reasons, actually. So um with that I would like to come to the uh oh no I actually have I think a video of that. Yes I have a video here. Sorry I forgot about that. Um so this is Sukatoa as
you can see it's for GPU profiling and what I'm doing now is um I'm actually opening a capture. So this capture was done from a real device. So it captured performance data and as we can see here in the middle um we have such a performance graph. I think there are people in the room who understand exactly what that means. I don't. I'm an expert in tool,
not in profiling data. But you can see pretty nicely. You can drill down here. And what's interesting, the thing in the middle might look familiar to some of you. Um, that's actually the Google Perfeiling viewer that is embedded into Thea. And that shows a nice capability of Thea because it is standard web technology. You can use web components that are just out there. You don't have to
reinvent them. You can just embed them. Um, and as you can see, it also has a code editor embedded where you can see the shader code. If you um are interested in this tool, and by the way, also in Cubmx2, you find both in the internet free for download. You can just check them out. They also have example projects, so you can just uh try them out
yourself. And as you hopefully were able to see, this tool again looks completely different than the other tools, which shows again the complete freedom you have uh if you use this platform. Uh let me go to my final slide here. Yeah, with that I would like to come to an end. Now I want to close here with really inviting any one of you who is interested in
building tools and idees to join the story. Um as Thomas just just mentioned um the is not next generation. It's really current generation and as releases only in March there was ST micro micro electronics and Samsung releasing their two major tools and there are many others. So it's not something for early adopters anymore. It's really uh standard uh current generation. Um now if you're interested uh we
really want to invite you to engage with the community. Um please start discussions in the forum if you have any questions. We are really really proud of our forum and a lot of people spend significant effort in answering every single question there. I haven't seen any question uh stayed unanswered for literally months. So whatever you want to ask, whatever you want to know, please just go on
GitHub, open a discussion there. Um we have weekly calls with the core developers, but these are open to anyone. So if you want to meet the people behind the project and you want to ask your questions face to face, you can just dial in um talk to the core team different companies joining there. If you already adopt Thea um and that goes back to what Thomas just
mentioned, please come out of the dark. So um as you can see, we already have quite a lot of companies on our homepage. Uh but we actually know as a matter of fact that there are other adopters um that do not communicate that for whatever reason. Um, [snorts] if you use Thea, uh, please add your logo and a screenshot of the tool that you build on our
website. That's marketing for you, marketing for us, and that shows others what tools are out there, which I think is great for everyone. Um, there's also the option to um, publish what we call an adopter story. So, we literally in collaboration with the Eclipse Foundation help you to uh, write an article about your tool, about your journey. Um and that will be published by the Eclipse Foundation
and usually gets a lot of visibility. So you get basically get free marketing for your tools. And finally, if you adopt Thea um consider to influence its development as Thomas mentioned before, we're really proud that Thea is a very open project and that means it's not controlled by one person or by one company. It's really uh the purpose is to serve the needs of all adopters and
if you need a new feature, if you want to change the direction, if you want to influence the architecture, start to contribute to it. Um the first contribution is typically to report bugs or report feature requests. We're very thankful even if you don't fix them because we want to know what adopters experience like what they need uh and what bugs they experience. And of course um if
you're a strategic adopter, please consider to start code contributions that that of course always help. [snorts] Um let me mention if you adopt Thea and you want to um strengthen the maintenance or if you're missing features um Thea also has a commercial ecosystem attached to it. Um on the website you find several companies that provide um services for Thea. Um that can be two things. Number one,
um, if you if you want to strengthen the maintenance of thea, but you don't want to commit yourself, you can sponsor these companies to do that on your behalf. So add features, fix bugs, or basically just contribute to the base maintenance. And all these companies can typically also help you very well in building your own tools. So you can hire them to basically get your own tool
projects up to speed. Um, and finally, if you have any question, this is uh this is my email address. Um and I can also forward to Thomas. Um you can also scan this QR code to get my contact details. Um please feel free to talk to us. Now um before I raise the obligatory question to Thomas what we talk about next year, I want to mention actually
three more sessions. I forgot to put one on slide. Uh two two more sessions. Now directly after this talk in exactly 10 minutes um there will be a talk in this room um about uh experience how to adopt thea in practice with really very practical uh hints guidelines pitfalls um things to do and things to to not do given by Stefan over there. So if you're interested
in learning more about the very strong recommendation just stay seated or grab a coffee and come back. It's literally the next session in now nine minutes. Um, and if you have more questions and want to discuss something or want to get closer to the the ecosystem, we will have a birds of a feather session today and evening um at 7 o'clock. Um, the title is building next
generation tools at Eclipse AI web and cloud. However, a strong focus on that in in that uh session will be around thea [snorts] and other technologies that you can integrate well and with that before I open it to questions from the audience I my question that I always ask Thomas if we do this talk ever again if if it gets accepted again what is your prediction what
do we talk about next year >> I think we'll talk about the success that the AI will have in the marketplace um and also I think We'll talk about more success stories from from adopters. >> I I sure hope so. But actually, as a matter of fact, I know some projects that have not released yet. So, it's pretty likely. All right. With that, um, I would like
to thank you very much for attending. And I want to open it for questions before we close. Are there any question? Please raise your hand so that the uh you can get a microphone. Right. If you have any questions later, please approach any one of us. Um Thomas is typically also at our booth, so that's a good place to meet. Um yeah, and thank you very much
for listening again and hopefully see you uh in now eight minutes in this room and at 7 o'clock at our evening both and enjoy the rest of your conference.
