Managing Concurrent Heterogeneous Editing in Web-Based Modeling Tools

Graphical modeling languages are one of the most common approaches for model driven software engineering. Traditional graphic modeling tools like Eclipse Sirius are usually powerful monolithic desktop applications, yet built on top of rather outdated technologies, such as GEF3, GMF and SWT. As the overall trend in software engineering goes towards extensibility, portability and re-usability, it also led to big movement in model driven software engineering. There is high interest in a transition from monolithic modeling tools to web-based solutions. The usage of quickly evovling web technologies such as HTML5 promises to increase usability, accessibility, future-proofness and make use of distributed deployment options. With the implementation of the Graphical Language Server Protocol and the GLSP Framework a big step towards a modern web-based solution for web-based graphical modeling was already taken. The implemented GLSP framework is on the client-side based on the open source frameworks Eclipse Sprotty and creates with the extensible open source platform Theia a desktop-IDE-like client. By applying the architectural pattern of the Language Server Protocol it forms a client-server protocol framework for graphical modeling languages and, as a consequence, may provide the same exibility and decoupling of the modeling language implementation from the actual modeling tool platform.
The main purpose of graphical modeling editors lies in visual representations and different editing possibilities of the underlying model.