RAP/Equinox WAR products

This year’s Summer of Code application deadline has passed. I want to take the chance and introduce you to my planned project. I think the results will be a great benefit for the community. So, what does RAP/Equinox WAR products mean?

When searching the RAP newsgroup for “WAR deployment” 210 threads appear. The reason for this is that many developers have problems deploying a RAP application. These problems exist because RAP products build on top of Server-Side Equinox. Equinox has special requirements for the deployable archive. To making things easier for beginners and to simplify the deployment process a good approach and tooling is needed. The goal of this GSoC 2010 project is to provide this approach and tooling.

The planned approach is called WAR products. This should be a similar concept as the well known Eclipse product approach to make RCP developers feel at home. The tooling for the WAR products should also be very similar to the existing product tooling. I already talked to Chris Aniszczyk about this project and we both agree not to create a whole new tooling for the WAR products. I think it would be the best to make the existing tooling plugable to reuse most of the components for the WAR product tooling.

How does this fit in the RAP project? Well, I think RAP is probably the biggest consumer of the Server-Side Equinox technology. With this fact it’s in the interest of the RAP community to have a good concept and tooling for users. While doing this project as part of RAP we can easily get feedback from the community. Rüdiger Herrmann, co-lead of the RAP project, already agreed to mentor this GSoC project.

So, wouldn’t it be great to have such a tooling for WAR products? With this kind of tooling we can handle the deployment of Server-Side Equinox based applications the same way as normal RCP applications. The only problem at this point is the project needs to be accepted for GSoC 2010. So, my call to all accepted mentors: Please give the project a good vote. The full project’s proposal can be found at the Eclipse Wiki (Maybe you have some good ideas you want to share?). Thanks in advance for all votes.