Christmas is only a few days away and we at the RAP team wanted to show our appreciation to you, our community, for your active participation in setting directions for RAP and for RAP development.  As a small Christmas present, we’d like to give a preview of the next release so you don’t have to wait until June 2011 to see the Indigo features in action. Please lean back and enjoy our Indigo Sneak Preview screencast:

As you know we are an Eclipse project.  And, as an Eclipse Project, we believe in the mantra, “ship early, ship often.”   As a result of this, you don’t have to wait for Indigo to use the features shown in the screencast. You can simply download our latest milestone build or checkout the code from our CVS. You will find additional information here:

Tags: christmas, eclipse, indigo, rap

Your early Christmas present from EclipseSource: a custom-widget that displays, controls and reacts to a Google-Map. While there have been similar widgets before, this one is the first (as far as I know) that runs in RAP and RCP without any changes.

[ Download ] (You also need RAP 1.4M4.)

Creating custom-widgets for RAP is no easy task. You need to be familiar not only with Java and JavaScript, but with a lot of RAP’s complex internals as well. It’s a lot of work, even if you simply want to integrate an existing javascript-application or library.

That’s now a lot easier, using the much improved browser-widget. We recently added some missing features, tested different scenarios and fixed known bugs. This makes it an ideal platform to insert javascript-based applications with almost no overhead for the programmer. You simply call JavaScript from Java and vice versa! And the bonus: these custom-widgets can (under certain conditions) also run in RCP, as demonstrated here.

The widget is currently hosted at github, so feel free to check it out, use it in your application or fork it to add your improvements. Also check out Holger Staudachers carousel widget for RAP to see another example.

“Traditional” custom widgets for RAP are by no means obsolete with this, as they still have certain advantages (slightly better performance, themeability, can use rap client components). But for the cases mentioned above, the browser widget can make your life much easier!

Happy Holidays!

Tags: eclipse, Google Maps, indigo, rap, rcp

Hi,

We’d like to know more about RAP in the wild. Please take a moment and answer the question that follows below. We will publish the results of this anonymous poll later on this blog, and we’ll use them to influence the direction of the research work of the Sovereign project.

Thanks for your time.

How do you run your RAP application today?

War deployment in a plain Servlet Container (Tomcat, Jetty)

War deployment in an application server (JBoss, Glassfish, …)

Virgo Kernel with additional Jetty

Virgo Web Server

PaxRunner

PaxRunner with war profile

Standalone Equinox with embedded Jetty

Command Line / homebrewed launch script

View ResultsVote Now

Create an online survey quiz or web poll

War deployment in a plain Servlet Container (Tomcat, Jetty)0%

War deployment in an application server (JBoss, Glassfish, …)0%

Virgo Kernel with additional Jetty0%

Virgo Web Server0%

PaxRunner0%

PaxRunner with war profile0%

Standalone Equinox with embedded Jetty0%

Command Line / homebrewed launch script0%

Other: (Please specify)0%

Create an online survey quiz or web poll

Tags: equinox, jetty, paxrunner, rap, sovereign, tomcat, war deployment

November is over now and last week I attended the last DemoCamp for the year. In this year’s November DemoCamp series I spoke at three events and with this post I’d like to present you with some impressions.

Bonn, November 16th: The beginning…

It was the first DemoCamp that was located in Bonn ever. So, as a result of this the audience was not very big, although at least 40 people found their way to the demos. I was already familiar with most of the talks.  I’d seen both Marcel Bruch’s talk on the Code Recommenders project and Mathias Sohn’s talk about EGit before, but they are still interesting. Besides these talks, one highlight was the talk about Xtext from Karsten Thoms which I hadn’t seen before in this form. He demonstrated how easy it is to create a DSL with Xtext. It’s fantastic what people can do with Eclipse technology.

Afterwards we all met at the Stammtisch. The bad thing was that Ralph Müller had to leave the talks early because he wasn’t feeling well. (Just a note here that he left before the RAP talk, so it wasn’t the talk that made him sick)

München, November 23rd: Party time…

For me it was the first time speaking at the annual DemoCamp in Munich. The organizers are well known Eclipse folks: Jonas Helming, Maximilian Koegel and Ekke. The cool thing was that these guys were so good at publicizing the camp that 100 people decided to spend an evening watching the demos. One thing that I missed was the talk by Marcel Bruch. Marcel where were you? Despite Marcel being missing, there were some really good talks. Two examples are the e4 talk by Tom Schindl and the Mylyn talk by Benjamin Muskalla. Of course both talks have been given before but I still recommend listening to them. They’re great speakers. Of course the RAP talk was another highlight

To put it all in a nutshell Munich was one of the best DemoCamps ever.  It had a very friendly atmosphere with beer service during the talks (thanks Jonas) and a great Stammtisch afterwards. But once more Ralph missed it so I had to pay for my own.

Karlsruhe, December 9th: The return of Ralph…

The last DemoCamp I visited in this series was the Karlsruhe DemoCamp last week. And guess what?  Marcel Bruch was speaking there. Why was I not surprised ? In addition to his talk, there was a world premiere in the form of Markus Tiede from Bredex presenting Jubula, one of the most recently created Eclipse projects. It was really fun to watch the IDE program by itself. Some other good talks were given by Benjamin Muskalla and Karsten Thoms. I saw Karsten in Bonn and the good thing was, that he presented two different talks. Its really nice to see that some people invest the time to provide fresh talks to the audience. I think I need to create a new talk too

The same as with the other camps, there was a Stammtisch afterwards. And surprisingly Ralph Müller was there too. So, the first round was on the Eclipse Foundation. Thanks Eclipse Foundation! I’m sure he came because he wanted to give his 6 democamps tour a nice finish. Hope to see you on more Stammtisch’s next year, Ralph.

To sum up, it was a great month with a lot of traveling. I met a lot of nice people that are all involved in Eclipse in their own way:  some as IDE users, some as contributors, some Foundation folks and a few committers – the ecosystem in its pure form. So, I hope to see some of you again at EclipseCon next year where I hope I’ll also be able to show you Eclipse RTP.

Tags: democamp, e4, eclipse, jubula, rap, redview, tycho, xtext

If you were looking for something to give that hard-to-buy-for person on your Christmas list, what about Eclipse 3.7 Milestone 4?  That’s right, just as planned, another Milestone has shipped.

There are pretty interesting goodies in this milestone too, like the ability to jump straight to a super implementation

Grab source with your target:

And (my favorite) update your target

There is even a new feature in p2 to help plug-in developers manage their license agreements easier:

Checkout the New and Noteworthy yourself or download the gift that keeps on giving (simply enable automatic updates ):

http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/S-3.7M4-201012081300/index.php

Today’s a great day. The Eclipse Foundation accepted the proposal for the RTP Project. RTP stands for Runtime Packaging.  And here’s what it’s all about.

Marcus Baker wrote an article called “Install Me“, which was published in the book “97 things a programmer should know“. On two pages he shows the reader exactly how important the first minutes are when a new user tries to get familiar with your software. He argues that it is the responsibility of  the software developer, to make it as easy as possible for the user to see that your software is what he needs.

Currently we don’t do a good job with this at EclipseRT. There are several EclipseRT technologies out there and every one provides an individual starting point for new users. From my point of view, changing this would bring EclipseRT a big step further.

That’s the inspiration behind the RTP project.  All that a user should have to do is download – install – run. The idea is to create one or more common starting points that new users can use to get familiar with EclipseRT technology.  Once we have the installation accomplished, we’ll have to convince the user with good examples and documentation. Investigation shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. If the user doesn’t see what he needs in his first five minutes, the software will not get a second chance. There is also the chance of course, that the annoyed user might spread the word that the software doesn’t do the job right.  So, its definitely worthwhile to invest in keeping new users happy.

And this is what RTP is all about:  working with as many EclipseRT projects as possible to provide a really good out-of-the box experience for new users. If you are interested in this project please let me know. We welcome all help towards succeeding with RTP. If you want to learn more about RTP there are also two EclipseCon 2011 submissions (submission 1, submission 2) you can read.

Tags: BIRT, ecf, eclipse, eclipseRT, emf, epp, equinox, ercp, OSGi, p2, rap, riena, swordfish

A few weeks ago, my colleague Ralf Sternberg, announced that RAP supports a JQuery integration. What we still needed to do was to create an example that shows how to integrate some JQuery stuff into RAP. Yesterday I took a little time to work on it. I used the JQueryUI Carousel widget as a base. Two hours later the integration and a book store example were completed. You can see the result in the screencast below.

The special thing about this integration is that it uses the SWT Browser widget with BrowserFunctions. This makes this type of integration very lightweight and simple to develop. As I mentioned before, two hours were enough to create the example. Of course, besides JQuery you can integrate all kinds of Frameworks, Mashups and other things that are running in a browser. Ian Bull highlighted this by developing a GMap example. The cool thing about this technique is that it works with RAP (RWT) and RCP (SWT).

I made the source code publicly available via github. You can find the repository here. It would be great to see some other examples. So, please feel free to post your examples in a comment.

Tags: browser widget, eclipse, indigo, JQuery, rap, rcp, swt