Some of the most common problems involved in mobile development include dealing with multi-platform, security and maturity of the available platforms. But does multi-platform really matter with iOS breaking adoption records? I am sure that Google and Microsoft believe that their platforms will become breakthrough successes as well. While no one can make a definitive statement about their future success, I don’t think that anyone would bet a fortune on their failure either. This leaves us with three options for addressing multi-platform: HTML5, development for each platform or making a bet on which will be the most successful.

HTML5 is great technology – not only for mobile – but there is a growing body of lessons learned the hard way. Our own experience revealed that it is easy to get started with HTML5 and that the state-of-the-art JavaScript libraries look really great. But when it comes to running and using the apps the excitement mostly turned into disillusion. The other two options did not seem like good solutions for us, so we decided to add another option: RAP mobile.

RAP mobile gives us some key advantages over the alternatives. First, it allows multi-platform development in Java. It uses the iOS and Android native widget toolkits for rendering the user interface with optimal performance and native look and feel. And, it provides a mature and Open Source platform for writing and deploying business applications on standard JEE servers. It also provides a solution for common data security concerns with mobile devices.

Today we launched the RAP mobile developer preview program and the RAP mobile project site. If you are curious about how RAP mobile works and what it has to offer visit http://rapmobile.eclipsesource.com.

With our expansion to Munich we can now better accommodate our customers in southeast Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But beyond the geographic expansion it is a big step for EclipseSource to enter the world of modeling, as we have been hesitant to get involved deeply with the technology over the last decade.

Two things made us change our minds: EMF’s versatility and the availability of a great team. Max and Jonas have proven their EMF expertise with the EMFStore project and in joint projects with EclipseSource.

Now, you no longer need to hesitate to contact us with your Eclipse Modeling questions and challenges. We are looking forward to it.

redView looks pretty promising, and although personally I am not a big fan of modeling and code generation there might be a sweet spot for redView for people who have tons of forms to fill in data.

One really nice thing about redView is that they created a detailled install instruction (a yoxos profile could probably help here), and a bunch of demos to get started.

http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/examples
http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/installation/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redview/files/

P.S: The obligatory question about single sourcing redView has been discussed, and as redView is EMF + Riena it looks feasible to get redViews working in RAP. Even the visual form designer imposes no hurdles that could not be overcome (plain SWT, no GEF).

The day was packed with interesting presentations on Open Source Business models, Licensing, Open Source case studies and an outstanding presentation by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond. His presentation was on Open Source adoption and his research is very encouraging for the Eclipse community and our EclipseSource offerings. Security, Maintenance and support are key issues when it comes to Open Source adoption, that is exactly what we offer for core Eclipse technologies like Equinox, RCP or RAP. He was comparing the Eclipse community to a shopping mall for customers with anker stores (big players) and boutique stores that together make a very compelling offering. Integration is key as enabler for a best of breed approach. I can really recommend his research on this topic. As an attendee of the summit I am one of the lucky guys getting this slides …

The little presentation on moving RAP to Open Source that I gave is public to everyone and is talking about some of the challenges working in the open – specifically in the context of Eclipse. You can view it online just below.

If you are looking for values of an Eclipse membership – this is the kind of event you should attend next time. We have been already discussing briefly about having an Open Source Strategy Summit at Eclipse Summit in Ludwigsburg this fall. I will sign up for this as soon as it will get announced.

Update: A slightly abriged version of Jeffrey Hammands slides are available from the Open Source Strategy agenda page.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgthqBYsYsk

I think this is fun, but maybe I am getting too much into marketing …
Any comments?

A very brief benchmark showed the following results for the RAP based CRM system we are using:

Startup time (initial loading of the app):

FF3: 4sec
Safari4: 2sec

It seems like Safari is very fast when having to deal with a bulk of JavaScript, approx. 120 KB of compressed JavaScript for building the inital UI. Outperforming Firefox 3 by a factor of 2.

Switching between Overview and Contacts perspective a couple of times and calculating the average leeds to the following results:

FF3: 1s
Safari4: 0.8s

The difference may seem insignificant, but it feels like the difference between a slightly sluggish and a very responsive system. Now, switching between the resources perspective and the plugin development perspective in my Eclipse IDE takes approx. 0.5 seconds on my system. The gap is getting smaller.

Not to mention startup times ….

With the new RAP 1.1 service release which is part of Ganymede SR2 we are now also supporting key navigation in table and tree for Safari – version 3 and 4.

“Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform – Bringing Rich Clients to the Web” by Fabian Lange

A book is always a great endorsement for a technology. Having an author with no affiliation to the producers of the technology is even better. Nevertheless, when I read Fabians message that the book was now in print – and it had not worked out that one of the RAP committers acted as a reviewer – I felt a little bit uneasy. After the book finally arrived and having a look at it I must admit for no good reason . I stumbled upon the usage of the word component in a way that seems rather uncommon, but it all makes sense if you take it as “ui component”. I have not followed the examples, but I am sure that Fabian did a great job there too.

The RAP book at Amazon

The book touches all relevant aspects of RAP, and provides a concise guide for getting started with RAP. It includes a section on single sourcing RCP and RAP applications with some really valuable tips. It also touches on styling RAP applications and finishes with the deployment on application servers. With its volume of 150 pages it can’t provide a lot of depth, but it is really a great book to get started with RAP. RCP Developers with requirements to make their apps available in browsers and developers interested in evaluating RAP going beyond “Hello World” will get a really good bang for the buck. And the book is pretty much up to date with the current 1.2 developments.

Just in case anybody is interested in complementing Fabians book with an “Advanced development with Eclipse RAP” or “The Eclipse RAP compendium” – you should feel encouraged and we might be able to help. How about you Fabian?

There have been some promising experiments and demos going on already, the latest ones mainly targeting the desktop side of the affairs. Using the source code of the latest EMF based demos and compiling it against the RAP target platform revealed only a few api methods that were not available, and not now the code is already running in the browser.

It is really cool that there are no singletons in the new codebase, so it is working in a multi-user environment without any changes necessary. It does not yet look pretty, but that is another topic we want to address with e4 …

The demo shown on the screenshot above is a good example that even if you can reuse the same code for client and web it does not always makes sense. The point here is that the image is now resized on the server to fit within the space available for the CTabFolder. It would be much better to have the browser handle this on the client side.

It is often possible to deal with different requirements of server and client effectively if you follow some best practices. Frank, the technical lead of the RAP team will do a webinar on this topic on Oct 23.

You now no longer depend on our design capabilities, just do it yourself. And to help you get started we created a mockup presentation as part of the rap demo that comes with M4.

We have recently been talking to a company that does user interface design for a couple of famous customers and they offered to help with UI and interaction design. I am very much looking forward to work with those guys.

The latest RAP 1.1 M4 build provides a couple of more interesting new things: We have been moving to the 3.4 code base and created some tooling to enable PDE jUnit style testing. We are even using the original tests from JFace / Platform. See the New and Noteworthy for details and more interesting new stuff.