Re: [ecd-pmc] New Project proposal: Sprotty

[Oliver Kopp <kopp.dev@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

(Disclaimer: The last paragraph was added in comparison to
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=535841#c1 - I thought,
it would be good to discuss it here)

Nice to see to get a web-based graphical modeling tool into ECD.

I started coding custom editors with Oryx. Due to licensing issues
(refs https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15939), we
reimplemented everything from scratch using the jsPlumb framework
(refs https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=8023). Last
year, we made a switch from plain JSP pages to an Angular-based UI.
Thereby, we reevaluated jsPlumb and compared it to JointJS, Raphaël,
Draw2D, D3, FabricJS, and PaperJS. See
https://ultimate-comparisons.github.io/ultimate-graphframework-comparison/.
>From the best ones, we implemented a minimal example to get a feeling
how easy it is to have editing (!) capabilities. See
https://winery.github.io/javascript-graph-library-comparison/. (The
idea itself stems from the TodoMVC page: http://todomvc.com/).

Even there, jsPlumb did come out best.

Seeing that both Winery and Sprotty share significant goals (modern,
user-centric look and feel; cloud IDE; graph rendering + editing), I
see a lot of synergy potential.

We reimplemented both our topology modeler
(https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16106) and our
BPMN4TOSCA modeler (refs
https://dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13944) using Angular
and jsplumb. It works fine.

In a larger context, we are looking for a general web-based framework
(embedable in Angular) to render graphs. So, this is a very welcomed
project for us.

While searching the email archives, I saw that I had contact with
Eclipse Source in July 2017 because of an EclipseCon talk
(https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2017/session/web-based-modeling-tools).
We found that Sprotty is not contained at
https://github.com/ultimate-comparisons/ultimate-graphframework-comparison.
There could be a possible volunteer adding a "Sprotty.md" into
https://github.com/ultimate-comparisons/ultimate-graphframework-comparison/tree/master/data.
:)

Greetings from Stuttgart from the Eclipse Winery
(https://eclipse.github.io/winery/) hacking HQ,

Oliver