GeeCON Prague 2019: E.Demčenko - Extending Cloud/Desktop IDEs, providing a new choice for developers

### Overview In this GeeCON Prague 2019 presentation, speaker E. Demčenko from Broadcom discusses the motivation and technical architecture behind modernizing developer environments for mission-critical systems, specifically z/OS mainframe environments. Mainframes continue to handle high-stakes workloads such as global financial transactions and power management, representing decades of established infrastructure. However, a major generational shift in the workforce is taking place: veteran mainframe developers are retiring, and incoming engineers accustomed to modern developer tooling (such as Git, GitHub, and VS Code) often balk at traditional 3270 green-screen terminal interfaces. Rather than embarking on high-risk, expensive migrations of millions of lines of mission-critical production code to distributed systems, Broadcom and the open-source community are bridging the gap by bringing modern cloud and desktop IDE standards to mainframe development.

### Key Topics - **Generational Shift and Mainframe Relevance:** Mission-critical mainframe systems remain actively developed and essential. Modernizing the developer experience avoids rewriting massive production codebases while making mainframe development accessible to new generations of developers. - **Eclipse Che vs. Eclipse Thea:** The evolving roles of cloud development tools. Eclipse Che has evolved into a containerized workspace manager rather than a standalone IDE, while Eclipse Thea acts as an extensible, multi-language IDE framework built with TypeScript, Node.js, and Electron that runs both in desktop and browser environments. - **Open Industry Protocols:** The adoption of community-driven standards—namely the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)—to decouple editors/IDEs from specific programming languages and debuggers. - **Tooling Integrations:** Demonstrations of Eclipse Che on Red Hat OpenShift, Gitpod integration for instant workspace provisioning directly from GitHub, and Broadcom's Che4z project targeting mainframe languages.

### Technical Details - **Eclipse Che Architecture (v7.1):** Che serves as a workspace controller orchestrating user runtimes in container pods across Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters. Each plugin and user runtime runs in its own pod with persisted state in a database. It supports single-user or multi-user configurations, with multi-user setups relying on OpenID and PostgreSQL. - **Eclipse Thea Framework:** Designed as an extensible alternative to proprietary IDE architectures. It uses JSON-RPC for communication, shares architecture similarities with VS Code, but offers open-source friendly licensing and deeper framework extensibility beyond standard VS Code extensions. - **Language Server Protocol (LSP) & Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP):** Defined via JSON-RPC microservice architectures, separating client-side UI from language processing (syntax checks, semantics coloring, intelligent code completion) and debugging logic. The speaker references implementations such as LSP4J, Xtext (by TypeFox) for language parsers, and custom language servers implemented for COBOL and Assembler (developed in C++ by Charles University students). Debuggers for mainframes execute remotely (e.g., debugging CICS/kicks transaction regions) while exposing standard DAP interfaces to the IDE frontend.

### Takeaways - Standard protocols like LSP and DAP prevent vendor lock-in and enable cross-compatibility across VS Code, Eclipse Thea, Eclipse, and IntelliJ. - Adopting standardized cloud-based workspace managers (Eclipse Che) and extensible IDE frameworks (Eclipse Thea) allows organizations to provide turn-key development stacks for diverse, legacy, or specialized languages. - For mission-critical and mainframe environments, bringing modern developer ergonomics and Git-centric workflows bridges the skills gap for incoming developers without abandoning proven production systems.