Language Server Protocol

GLOSS - A Graphical Language Server on the Smalltalk Platform

The Graphical Language Server Protocol (GLSP) is emerging as a standard for communication between web-based graphical modelling clients and model servers, with existing implementations in Java and TypeScript — but none in Smalltalk. This paper describes the design and implementation of GLOSS, a GLSP-compliant model server built in Pharo Smalltalk, and compares it to the authors' existing EVA graphical modelling environment. The result reveals both the advantages of Smalltalk's dynamic, object-oriented approach and a set of concrete limitations in the GLSP protocol itself.