.theia sub-directory of workspace?

[glsp-bot]

There is a .theia sub-directory within the coffee editor demo workspace containing launch.json, settings.json, and tasks.json. The contents of these files suggest to me that I don't need them. Will anything disastrous happen if I delete them? I'm guessing they're artifacts from an old VSCode editing session at EclipseSource and really don't belong in the distro. But then I notice the workspace also contains an Eclipse .project file, .classpath, and a .settings directory that is JDT-related. I'm unclear what all these Java-related elements are doing there. Can you clear this up for me? And why is there a pom.xml file in a workspace that doesn't contain any source code to build? I see in the built version of the demo workspace bin and target directories, but they are empty. I don't quite understand what Theia actually does with its workspace, and any explanation would be appreciated. BTW, while watching the server console during the beginning of some testing I did see messages related to watching the files in question, but I still don't understand why.

original thread by GaryKopp

[planger]

The .theia folder is similar to the .vscode folder in VSCode. It contains workspace preferences, launch configurations and tasks. If you remove them, nothing problematic will happen, but you may loose the available tasks, settings, etc.
The .project file and .classpath are required if you need language support for Java. The Java language support in Theia is based on Eclipse JDT which needs those files. JDT will put the compiled class files of your Java sources into the bin folder, if it is configured this way in the Java-related project configuration.
All that including the pom.xml file is there, I believe, as the coffee editor also supports Java code generation and therefore needs those files to compile the generated Java sources in the workspace.