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[friends-of-theia] Late TheiaCon 2026 proposal: migrating a 20-year Eclipse RCP product to Theia

Hi Jonas and TheiaCon program committee,


I know the call for proposals closed at the end of September, and I'm sorry for being late. I'd still like to offer a talk in case there's room in the program.

DeltaWalker (https://deltawalker.com), our visual file and folder comparison application, ran on Eclipse RCP for twenty years. We have now rebuilt it on Eclipse Theia, and built a second product on the same foundation: DupliWalker (https://dupliwalker.com). The talk is a candid adopter story about that migration and should be useful to RCP teams who are deciding what to do next.

I'm flexible on format and would be glad to:

  • give a shorter version (10–15 minutes) instead of the full 25-minute slot, or
  • stand by in case a scheduled speaker cancels

From Eclipse RCP to Theia: Bringing a 20-Year File-Comparison Product to the Browser
Full presentation, 25 minutes

Many Eclipse RCP products now face the same question: what comes after RCP? DeltaWalker, a visual file and folder comparison application, ran on Eclipse RCP for twenty years. We rebuilt it on Eclipse Theia as both a browser and an Electron application, with most product code shared between the two. To test whether the new architecture was more than a port, we built a second product on it: DupliWalker, a duplicate-file and identical-folder finder.

This is a candid adopter story about using Theia as an application platform rather than an IDE. We will cover:

  • what carried over from RCP, what had to be rewritten, and how views, editors, and commands map onto Theia contributions and dependency injection;
  • turning an IDE-oriented workbench into focused products, and the IDE assumptions we had to replace;
  • why we built our own virtual file system instead of relying on Theia's: progress reporting for long copy and directory-reading operations, which Theia's file layer doesn't provide, and a single model for local disks, SFTP, and cloud storage such as Google Drive;
  • planning, previewing, and revalidating every deletion or synchronization before any user file changes.

We will then share where Theia sped us up, where its IDE heritage got in the way, and what we would structure differently today. The demo is a guided tour: a TypeScript program written against the same public object model used by the UI and by user scripts. Running in the browser on a disposable sample workspace in the Origin Private File System, it will perform real comparison and synchronization operations, and we will end by showing the tour's own source.

Attendees will leave with concrete patterns for moving an RCP product to Theia, and for building file-intensive, non-IDE applications that behave the same in the browser and on the desktop.

Thank you for considering it.

Best regards,
Yolian Ignatov
President, Deltopia Inc.
yolian@xxxxxxxxxxxx
www.deltopia.com


On Sep 21, 2026, at 00:22, Jonas Helming via friends-of-theia <friends-of-theia@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear community,

Quick reminder: the TheiaCon 2026 CFP is open until the end of September.

It’s broader than Theia itself: adopter stories, AI-native tooling, agentic workflows, platform internals, complementary technologies, or work on a completely different stack tackling similar problems. All of that fits.

If you’re building tools in this space and have something worth sharing, this is the venue.

The conference runs 28–29 October 2026, fully virtual, so no travel is needed either to attend or to speak.

Submit here: https://www.eclipse.org/events/2026/theiacon/cfp/

Best,
Jonas

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