Where should newcomers start?

[mrshaone]

Question

Hello friends,
I have a task to create a custom IDE for our company. After researching for days, I've found Eclipse Theia. I honestly scared of Eclipse products as I had bad experience with Sirius, but I decided to get my hands dirty. Started with documentations and stuck at very beginning with yo theia-extension command. After hours of struggling I found that I need to install Visual Studio 2022 and higher versions seems not compatible. Then I've faced another problem and then another one and so on...
Right now I was able to build both browser app and electron app, but I can't take my next step on customizing the app. The documentations on Theia website seems to expect me to know everything myself! Then I've came here to see if anybody else has the same problem but the discussion blew my mind! I don't even understand what are you guys talking about.
I just wanted to ask the community that where should I start? What should I read in order to understand this tool and be able to complete my task? I hope you don't suggest AI as they also don't know what's going on here. Please help me :D

[msujew]

Hey @mrshaone, thanks for the questions!

I honestly scared of Eclipse products as I had bad experience with Sirius

You should know that the Eclipse Foundation is just an umbrella foundation that hosts our work and provides the legal groundworks for multiple companies to work seamlessly together on one open source project. None of the people that work on Sirius are working on Theia :)

After hours of struggling I found that I need to install Visual Studio 2022 and higher versions seems not compatible.

We have dedicated build instructions for Windows, see here.

I can't take my next step on customizing the app

We have a bunch of documentation on that starting here. The main idea is that every service in Theia can be freely extended and then rebound using the dependency injection system in order to modify existing behavior. Adding new behavior is usually done by adding new *Contribution classes. See also here as an example.

Aside from that, I would recommend you to familiarize yourself with the code in this repository - generally, Theia custom app code is written in the same way code is written in this repo. I would also recommend taking a look at the TheiaIDE repo which contains the code for the official Theia-IDE distribution.

I hope you don't suggest AI as they also don't know what's going on here

AIs generally know too little about Theia to be helpful anyway, unless you give them the whole code repository as a knowledge source.

[mrshaone]

Dear @msujew, thanks for your instructive response. It clarified many things for me.

None of the people that work on Sirius are working on Theia :)

I see. I've also asked the Sirius dev team a question, but my hopes were dashed when they didn't respond. Seeing an open source community respond to questions with such speed really made my day.

Aside from that, I would recommend you to familiarize yourself with the code in this repository

After writing my question, I started reading the source code—and yes, that helped a lot. I'm starting to understand what's happening now. As a Java developer, diving into the source code is a bit challenging for me, but the architecture of this platform is really exciting. I have to say, the Theia team is doing a fantastic job.

Thanks again.
Best regards,

[JonasHelming]

Thank you for the nice feedback!