Whenever I’m working on UI stuff, something always goes terribly wrong Sometimes it’s only a margin or padding, other times it a composite that crosses my path. I was pretty happy that Chris Aniszczyk and Simon Archer hacked together Picasso, which helps you to identify some of these layout issues. As you may know, most of the time I work on the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and come across the same issues. As Picasso was originally intended to work for RCP, it’s not a long way to get it working for RAP.

In case you’re struggling with these issues too –  and working on RAP applications, please add your vote to bug 267975 so we can use Picasso on both runtimes.

Tags: layout, pde, picasso, rap, Single Sourcing, tips, ui

With e4 0.9 out in the wild, we should think again about the goals e4 tries to provide. One of them was to reduce the gap between Desktop and Web – not only speaking of reusing widgets but also to enable the platform handle multi-user scenarios. While the core e4 team concentrated on eliminating bad smells like singletons, the RAP team worked on better support for single sourcing applications in general. With an experimental version of RAP which includes some features not yet in the current release, we were able to run the demo out of the box including the whole underlying infrastructure like the modeled workbench – without touching the e4 code.

If you take a look at the RAP Demos page you’ll find the e4 contacts demo running on RAP. If you want to try it out yourself or even help to contribute to this effort, take a look this wiki page. In case you’re interested what you can do with e4, be sure to participate in the e4 webinars.This week, there will be Part 2 with topics like RAP, the Compatibility layer and the flexible resources model. Looking at the questions that came up in the last RAP webinar and the first part of the E4 webinar, people seem to be very interested how e4 and RAP play together. I’ll try to answer the open questions during the webinar this week. Looking forward to a great event.

Tags: databinding, e4, rap, Single Sourcing, swt

Finally I had some time to write down some of my experiences with integrating the Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) into a Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) application. I wrote it all down in a small tutorial that shows how you can integrate charts and reports seamlessly in your RAP application. Topics covered in the tutorial include how to setup the environment to let BIRT and RAP play well together.

Many thanks to BIRT committer, Virgil Dodson, to help with this tutorial- it was really great to get Eclipse committers from different projects working together!

Tags: BIRT, chart, rap, report, swt, tips

As Galileo is out in the wild and we are all already working on Helios… I thought it would be handy to give a quick overview of the New and Noteworthy features the RAP team worked on for Galileo. Besides many, many bug fixes… we still found time to provide several new features. On top of the new features, we focused on making single sourcing even easier to do.

New Look and Feel

This is one of the biggest features of RAP released as part of the train. As Ian already pointed out correctly:

One of the common complaints about RAP was that it doesn’t look like a web application.

While this was true in the past, we worked really hard to provide the community a clean and easy way how to customize the whole workbench styling.

Cell Editors

It’s finally done – RAP supports cell editors in the Table. As this was a really long-standing issue we’re more than happy to have it in 1.2.

Ed, now it’s time to give the whole “generated EMF editor on RAP” idea a new spin! For anybody interested in this story, please CC yourself on this bug.

Performance & Memory

The RAP team really had a great time for this release – we just sat there and waited for the browsers to become even faster…as this was a really silly task we decided to do something:

Improvement of Session Startup Performance

First the creating of the startup page is less CPU intensive. Second the javascript library content is not embedded in the startup page anymore and will be delivered separately. As the library content doesn’t change after server start it can be zipped once and buffered. This reduces CPU usage significantly. The library is stored in the browser’s cache and need not to be reloaded on subsequent application visits.

Client-side memory improvements

Included is also a new version of the Javascript library qooxdoo. Thanks to the great support by the RAP community, most notably from Stefan Hansel who tracked down a number of significant memory leaks in qooxdoo and provided patches to the qooxdoo developers, this version now brings a major improvement in client memory consumption. With this qooxdoo version, the long-standing memory leakage problems of RAP especially in Internet Explorer are resolved. Thanks to everyone who helped making this possible!

New API & Widgets

With the idea of single sourcing in mind we concentrated on adding new API to allow even more reuse of existing SWT/RCP code. Besides many small things like Display#timerExec() we also tried to complete the set of widgets. With 8 (yes, eight) new widgets in this release, these two are my personal favorites and often requested by the community.

DateTime

FormText (Forms)

Cursor Support

Summary

In case you’re not yet sure how “single sourcing” works – Ralf and Rüdiger would be happy to explain it to you step-by-step in their upcoming webinar.

In summary, we’re quite happy with the current 1.2 release but are already looking forward to the Helios release train.

If you have anything you want to see in 1.3, don’t hesitate and drop us a note.

Tags: api, galileo, memory, new and noteworthy, performance, rap

The show is over …

With a crowd of almost 200 attendees, many cool demos and the right weather for beer and pretzels… this was not only one of the biggest DemoCamps ever, it also was a lot of fun!

First I’d thank all the other speakers for their great contributions:

1. Hervé Couturier (SAP AG): Welcome
2. Ralph Mueller (Eclipse Foundation): Welcome
3. Krum Tsvetkov (SAP AG), Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseSource): Memory Analyzer & RAP – Single Sourcing in Practice (Demo Slides)
4. Michael Scharf (Wind River): A new View on Tables — a flexible framework to show tabular data in SWT Tables and Trees
5. Achim Demelt (eXXcellent solutions): Modeling is fun!
6. Jochen Hiller (Deutsche Telekom AG): Dynamic OSGi application using Equinox
7. Elmar Eperiesi-Beck (CORISECIO): Equinox based SOA Security Framework – a future Eclipse Project
8. Gunnar Wagenknecht (AGETO): Equinox on Servers – An introduction to the Eclipse Gyrex project
9. Marcus Harringer (MicroDoc GmbH): Virtual Embedded Devices with OSGi, Eclipse and Flash
10. Guy Philipp Bollbach (itemis): TMF Xtext: a self-experiment

During the evening, many photos were taken and some of the talks were even recorded on video.

The demo camp was introduced by Hervé Couturier and Ralph Mueller. They talked about SAP’s commitments to the Eclipse community and the growing level of participation.

After the introduction, Krum Tsvetkov gave a quick overview of the Eclipse Memory analyzer (MAT) and how you can use it to find memory leaks within 5 minutes. After the crowd understood what MAT is, I showed them how easy it is to have the same application running in the web by exchanging the runtime. Most of the people were quite impressed and it reminded me of what Chris once said: “Cool, one runtime to rule them all”. I’ll blog about the results of single sourcing MAT in the upcoming days so – in the meantime you can watch our talk.

Next Michael Scharf showed a small framework for handling tabular data on top of the existing JFace infrastructure that uses a columns-based approach instead of the existing row-based one. I hope they will consider contributing it to the community!

Achim Demelt gave us a fuzzy warm feelings about modeling with his demo “Modeling is fun!” He showed us some cool extensions to graphical editors like content assistance and compile/generate on save.

After a short break, Jochen Hiller showed us the power of dynamic OSGi systems. He did a demo on how to run some bundles and use several different bundle versions in parallel.

Elmar Eperiesi-Beck showed us a possible future Eclipse project – an Equinox based SOA Security Framework. He demonstrated how to secure a SOA application. With this approach he mentioned several times that Corisecio wants to contribute this project back to the Eclipse ecosystem (hope to see the proposal soon).

One new Eclipse project demonstrated was Gyrex. Gunnar gave us a quick introduction of the project. Gyrex provides a set of frameworks and tools around Equinox to allow seamless and pain-free operation of Equinox server clusters. Sounds pretty cool but we still need to “Stay tuned… they are working on an example for you to play with”.

Marcus Harringer of MicroDoc showed us an example of how to combine some of the cool kids of todays technology stack. They emulated real world devices like a turnstile with the help of Equinox and Flash for the client side. They used the emulation to write test scripts to create functional tests for their software implementions of the devices. Pretty cool demo on combining different technologies to solve real world problems.

The last but not least speaker was Guy Philipp Bollbach of itemis talking about Xtext. I think Xtext is one of the really cool technologies we have today. It helps you to write a grammar for your own DSL and let Xtext generate the whole stack of editors, outline views and other things like content assist for your DSL.  Really impressive!

All in all it was a really nice evening – most of the people I talked to had a great evening and learned about many cool Eclipse technologies. Most of the attendees enjoyed the democamp as much as I did. I hope to see some of you at the next DemoCamp or at a Stammtisch.

And as always – the Twitter community was very active during the DemoCamp – see all the related tweets @eventtrack.

Tags: democamp, eclipse, equinox, galileo, modeling, OSGi, rap, xtext

As they already did in January – the compeople AG (the folks behind the Riena project) are organizing another Stammtisch on May, 27th. It will take place in their offices in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. As Ian already pointed out, “Germany seems to love their DemoCamp” – but that’s only partly true: We also love our Stammtisch

Ralph will start the official part of the evening with some insights of the Eclipse Foundation and news about the open source community. In addition Ekkehard Gentz will give an introduction to UIs for business applications based on Riena, UML and oAW. And last but not least Jochen Krause will give some cool demos of new features for upcoming RAP 1.2 release.

After so many interesting topics, I hope to have some hot discussions over several cold beverages in the evening. At 7pm they are organizing a get together at the Chicago Meatpackers restaurant. Please let them know, if you participate by sending a mail to Andrea (dot) Drews (at) compeople (dot) de.

Really looking forward to see you there – I think it is going to be a great Stammtisch!

Tags: eclipse, emf, rap, riena, stammtisch

Ok, it’s getting tough. Only 9 days left before EclipseCon officially starts. All contributors and committers around me are already swarming around to get the demos and presentations ready – besides fixing bugs for the upcoming M6 build. But why is everybody so excited about EclipseCon? I think the numerous talks are only one side of the coin. Personally the way more interesting part is the come-together of all people you know from bug reports, mailing lists and newsgroups. While it is nice to see each other, it often brings up great discussions about Eclipse technology – especially interesting for me: RAP and E4.

The number of BoFs this year is tremendous. If you’re developing RAP applications or planning to use RAP in the near future, you should definitly visit me and the rest of the team at the RAP BoF. As this is the first BoF for the RAP project we’re really excited to see who’s coming. If you’re planning to attend, why don’t you just add some of your ideas to the list of discussion topics? The intention of BoFs is that you have the chance to talk directly with the RAP committers and give the team the chance to see your standpoints. Take the chance to poke us for all the bugs we didn’t fix yet Or if you’re interested to see any of the long-standing feature requests to be added to the plan – no problem (at least if you have enough beer for the team)! We’re looking forward to some lively discussions – not just as part of the BoF!

Tags: bof, e4, eclipsecon, rap

“A picture is worth a thousand words” – a true story.

The technology for impressive charts and reports already has a name in the mindset of Eclipse enthusiasts – it’s BIRT. But with the growing number of RAP applications in the wild, there is a big demand to integrate such technologies like BIRT into RAP applications. If you want to have nice colorful charts and good looking reports in your RAP application, why don’t you just drop in to the talk of Virgil Dodson and me about integrating BIRT into RAP. It’s not that hard, believe me!

We will give you advice how to avoid some of the common pitfalls and show you the possibilities you have to tweak your reports. Even if you want to single source your application with RCP, you can still use all the existing BIRT features as you know them. If you’re not yet familiar with the features of RAP itself, I think Ralf and Rüdiger would be glad to explain you all the details with hands-on examples in their tutorial on Monday.

It’s going to be a great conference. Register now and we’ll see you there.

Tags: BIRT, eclipsecon, rap, Single Sourcing