on Sep 21st, 2009RAP Case Study: Numiton Migration Tools
I always want to hear why people pick the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and what applications they are building with it. Last week I send a few questions to Robert Enyedi, CEO at Numiton.com, to find out how they use RAP.
(click picture to view demo)
Elias: What does your application do?
Robert: We are in the business of automated software migration and we wanted to show a bit of what we do. Any visitor can use this tool to browse migration samples shared by others. Registered users can also create their own snippets and share them if they choose to. We currently support the PHP language as input and produce Java code using the Spring framework or just plain servlets. In the future we plan to extend support to other input and output languages from our development pipeline.
Elias: Why did you choose Eclipse RAP?
Robert: The migration system is written in Java on top the the Eclipse RCP framework. So we needed a UI technology that interoperates well with Java.
Also, it had to be a Web application and not a regular site. Rich user experience was a must which brought AJAX-based technologies into focus. We are Java junkies, but an applet or Java Web Start application were out of the question: we couldn’t justify the need for a client-side JRE and its slow startup time for such a relatively simple application. Yes, since JRE 1.6.0 update 10 things improved, but how many users have that version installed?
Having previous experience with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), that was our next choice. However, as we laid out the features we wanted, we started to see that it will take a lot of effort to implement them in GWT. We wanted readily available functionality like wizards, message dialogs, dockable views and so on. When evaluating RAP we found all these and much more. We quickly rebuilt the prototype with RAP and SWTDesigner and never looked back.
Elias: How did RAP work out in your project?
Robert: We had a fast development time and we found no technical problems that we couldn’t overcome. It is fair to point out though that we have extensive Eclipse RCP experience from building our migration system and not only.
I want to emphasize that personally I am very pleased about the code quality we managed to maintain, even in the final phases of development. Compared to traditional Web applications, developing on the RAP platform makes it easy to produce well organized code. GUI design tools that work with SWT usually work with RWT as well – so designing the perspectives, views, dialogs and composites is very easy.
From the feedback that we have gathered so far, the users love the application and the overall usability is very good. They also appreciate the coolness factor, even if this is a really simple front-end.
Overall we look forward to the e4 platform for which RAP should provide the Web runtime and we strongly believe that even now RAP is the best technology for developing enterprise-grade Web applications.
Elias: Robert, thanks for the interview.
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Actually this is the first article that may change my opinion about RAP.
“Single source” is only a concept that works to certain point.
I was wondering why RAP is still alive if GWT offers much better UI experience (UI is calculated on browser side). Now I think I understand what is the real advantage of RAP.
Would it be possible to take the best from both technologies? I mean the speed (no network overhead) from GWT and the extensibility from RAP?
@Krzysztof: I suppose that by the network overhead of RAP you mean that there’s a constant traffic about the component states. I’m not sure if this really is a problem, since I believe network traffic is much lower compared to non-AJAX applications. This is due to the lack of full page loads. Also this should be a problem only for public internet applications and certainly not enterprise applications.
I admit that the migration tools application can be improved to increase the general responsiveness – hey, it’s a beta
. One point is in the wizards where all validations should be done only at page flip/finish and not on the content change of the fields (we’re working on it and the next update should fix this).
> Would it be possible to take the best from both technologies? I mean the speed (no network overhead) from GWT
> and the extensibility from RAP?
That’s gonna be difficult. Where would you draw the line? I.e what code would run on the client and what on the server? RAP draws the line between client and sever at widget level. This means that OSGi + Workbench + Your App runs on the server and thus mostly hides the fact of running in a distributed environment from the programmer. If you would shift that line, I fear things will become very difficult.
BTW are you aware of this talk/webinar?
RAP or GWT – Which Java-Based AJAX Technology is for You?
http://live.eclipse.org/node/722