Extension is not working in VS Code Web Browser

[rsoika]

Hi,
I have a general question about GLSP Extensions and the Gitlab project
Gitlab supports since some time an IDE Feature which loads vs-code in the browser. Since gitlab version17.11 is now also possible to install extensions from Open VSX - I have uploaded my Open-BPMN extension to this repo. And for example Theia of course works fine with this.

But the Gitlab IDE shows the message "The 'Open-BPMN' extension is not available in GitLab Web IDE for the Web."

Maybe this has something to do with the fact that my extension requires JDK 17. Does anybody know about this topic. What could be the reason the the Gitlab Web ID is not able to load my extension?

Thanks for any hints.

===
Ralph

[tortmayr]

Hi @rsoika,

Gitlab Web IDE only support VSCode webextensions.
General description from the doc:

Web extensions share the same structure as regular extensions, but given the different runtime, don't run with the same code as extensions written for a Node.js runtime. Web extensions still have access to the full VS Code API, but no longer to the Node.js APIs and module loading. Instead, web extensions are restricted by the browser sandbox and therefore have [limitations](https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/web-extensions#web-extension-main-file) compared to normal extensions.

In theory, you can also develop a pure web-based GLSP extension. We already provide an example for that. Note that this example uses the TS-based server flavor.

For your use case with a Java-backend creating a web extension is not as straight forward.
Since you can not run Java code directly in the browser you have to work around this.

In a nutshell you have to options:

• Decouple the server from the extension i.e. host the sever remotely. The extension then simply can connect to the adress/port of the running server. You could then also extend this approach by writing a controller service that allows dynamic startup/shutdown of server instances. Whenever a GLSP web extension is activated it can then request and use a new remote server instance. On deactivation the server instance can be released.

• Tranform your Java backend into browser-compatible code e.g. by using webassembly. I have never used this approach before so I don't know if its feasible and how much effort would be required.

[rsoika]

Ok, thanks for the answer. That is to much effort. My users can use Theia or VSCode - that's fine. But thanks for the clarification.