R. Rodriguez-Echeverria, J. Canovas Izquierdo, J. Cabot, M. Wimmer: An LSP infrastructure to build EMF language servers for web-deployable model editors, Second Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering Tools (MDETools 2018), Copenhage, Denmark; 15.10.2018, in Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering Tools (MDETools 2018), CEUR, TBD (2018), pages 1 - 10. pdf
The development of modern IDEs is still a challenging and time-consuming task, which requires implementing the support for language-specificfeatures such as syntax highlighting or validation. When the IDE targets a graph-ical language, its development becomes even more complex due to the renderingand manipulation of the graphical notation symbols. To simplify the developmentof IDEs, the Language Server Protocol (LSP) proposes a decoupled approachbased on language-agnostic clients and language-specific servers. LSP clientscommunicate changes to LSP servers, which validate and store language in-stances. However, LSP only addresses textual languages (i.e., character as atomicunit) and neglects the support for graphical ones (i.e., nodes/edges as atomicunits). In this paper, we introduce a novel LSP infrastructure to simplify the de-velopment of new graphical modeling tools, in which Web technologies may beused for editor front-ends while leveraging existing modeling frameworks to buildlanguage servers. More concretely, in this work, we present the architecture ofour LSP infrastructure, based on LSP4J, to build EMF-based graphical language servers.