I’ve spend the last few days adjusting the Ridget layer in Riena, to make it work with Eclipse RAP and Eclipse RCP. We call this process “single-sourcing” (EclipseCon tutorial).

Ridgets wrap around standard SWT / RWT controls to provide additional functionality and a better API. One example that you can see below: Ridgets have “markers”, which tag a control as mandatory, wrong or read-only and change the control’s behavior accordingly.

It’s worth mentioning that all three screenshots run from the same code. The only difference is the target environment used (RAP or RCP).

Ridgets styled with RAP's "business" theme

Ridgets styled with RAP's "classic" theme

Ridgets in a regular RCP application

Once this work is completed the Ridget API will be usable for RAP applications as well.

To stay informed about this effort:

• CC yourself to Bug 302893, and
• come to our EclipseCon talk “Riena 2.0 - New & Noteworthy“

Tags: eclipse rap, eclipsecon, riena

We recently had a workshop on redView with the developers of the project, probably many of you know ekke. We wanted to evaluate it and gain a better understanding if we could use it in the context of a project in the insurance space.

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).

Tags: eclipse rap, modeling, rcp, riena

The RAP team just announced the availability of RAP 1.3 M5!

If you’re interested in single-sourcing Eclipse-based applications, please give it a try.

In the 1.3 M5 release, the RAP team added more SWT API to make single sourcing existing applications easier:

• Composite#layout( Control[], int )
• MouseEvent#stateMask
• Widget#reskin( int ) and SWT.Skin event
• ImageData
• ImageLoader
• ImageLoaderEvent

The team also added IApplication support which simply translates into one less extension point you have to use to create a RAP application. In the past, RAP had its own entrypoint extension point which performed a similar role to what the application support does in Equinox already.  This should make RAP even easier for RCP developers to get into.

RAP is also taking advantage of the Equinox extension registry is able to handle multiple locales.

So please give RAP a try if you’re interested in bringing your RCP application to the web.

Tags: eclipse rap

The RAP team is proud to announce the fourth milestone for the Eclipse Helios release.

What’s new? Well, RAP now supports drag and drop semantics. The user can use the mouse and keyboard the way he is used to in his desktop applications to move, copy or link data. The API is SWT-compatible, using DragSource, DropTarget and Transfer.

JFace ControlDecoration support has been added to RAP so you can make your controls look pretty now.

There were many other features and fixes in the release, read the new and noteworthy for more information. If you have any feedback, please let the RAP team know on their mailing list.

Tags: eclipse rap, rap

I enjoy seeing people use EclipseRT technology in the wild. Recently I met and spoke with Austin Riddle from the Texas Center for Applied Technology (TCAT) about how they are using the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and what applications they are building with it.

1. What does your application(s) do?

We have several live RAP applications that take the form of information dashboards. These dashboards allow decision-makers and analysts to disseminate information and produce a common operating picture related but not limited to global biosurveillance and large-scale emergency preparedness/management. Users can log in to our systems, customize their view of information via component and profile switching, visually integrate information within the dashboard and selectively share information between echelons of human infrastructure. Our US government customers have been very pleased with the power and flexibility of the systems.

2. Why did you choose Eclipse RAP?

We needed a powerful Rich Internet Application. We needed one that had to provide capabilities that frankly push the limits of what a traditional RIA could deliver. It also had to perform on older hardware and software. After working with and analyzing other options, including GWT, Flex, OpenLaszlo and others, we decided that RAP provided both the features we needed to fulfill our requirements, and the framework to develop custom features that empower our users even more. Being able to leverage other Eclipse Runtime Technology in our applications greatly reinforced our decision.

3. How did single sourcing benefit your project?

Our organization has a significant investment in Eclipse RCP capabilities that we needed to leverage in order to meet our dashboard requirements. It was amazing to see elements from our desktop systems just “appear” in our RAP application after just “dropping” the bundles in. Also, during our development process, we actually wrote capabilities in our RAP application that could be used in our desktop RCP applications. This “reverse” single sourcing was a pleasant surprise!

4. In the end, how did RAP help and benefit your project?

Most impressively, we were able to implement a first working prototype of a dashboard system in 30 days! RAP gave us the ability to rapidly prototype and ultimately provide solid systems that have withstood the scrutiny of rigorous government security evaluations. Currently, we are looking into bringing even more of our eclipse-based desktop investments to the web.

Cool stuff, huh?

Tags: case study, eclipse rap, eclipseRT, rcp

Over the past few days I have spoken to many different groups at the EclipseRT days, various democamps and some students in one of our Advanced RCP courses. Each time people have asked…

“when is the OSGi and Equinox book coming out?”

Most were hopeful, some were trying to get a rise out of me. Well, ask and ye shall receive!

I am very pleased to say that the full, pre-copy-edited content is available on Rough Cuts. There are a few minor differences between what is online and what will end up in print but that is mostly a bit of grammar and a few technical fixes. The early versions of all the code is available though there are a few known issues in the packaging that we are still working on.

I am really very happy with how the book has turned out.  The structure has lots of content for everyone.  Tutorials, deep-dives, reference material. As you can see by the table of contents below, we start with some history, context and concepts. Then there is a set of tutorial chapters where we build up an example fleet management application called Toast to have a funky embedded vehicle user interface with Google Earth integration, client0server connectivity as well as a back-end control center for managing the fleet.

The Toast system from Chapter 14, the final tutorial chapter, has been donated to Eclipse as the Toast Examples project where is has been extended to have a RAP UI for the backend, EMF and EclipseLink for data management, ECF for infrastructure bits, etc etc.

The tutorial is followed by a number of deep-dives on key topics such as Declarative Services, the HTTP service, Remote Services (RFC119) and more.  Finally there are a set of reference chapters that go even deeper and look at the grotty issues of classloading, dynamic behavior and third party code libraries. It’s a good range of the popular OSGi concepts and services. Of course, there is always room for more in a 2nd edition! (can’t believe I said that…)

Part I:   Introduction
1              OSGi and Equinox
2              Concepts

Part II :  Tutorial
3              Tutorial Introduction
4              Hello Toast
5              Services
6              Dynamic Services
7              Client/Server Interaction
8             Testing
9              Packaging
10           Pluggable Services
11            Extensible User Interfaces
12            Dynamic Configuration
13            Web Portal
14            System Deployment with p2

Part III: Deep Dives
15            Declarative Services
16            Extensions
17            Logging
18           HTTP Support
19            Server Side
20           Release Engineering

Part IV: Reference
21            Dynamic Best Practices
22           Integrating Code Libraries
23           Advanced Topics
24           Declarative Services Reference

Now for finishing up the 2nd edition of the RCP book.  Chris and I are together this week and will be plugging away at the final tweaks before the copy-editing phase. The first 13 chapters of that book have gone to the copy editors and are available on Rough Cuts.

Tags: book, eclipse rap, eclipseRT, equinox, OSGi, p2, syndicate

Support for drag and drop just made it into the RAP source code repository. You can use the same API as known from SWT and thus re-use even more code when single-sourcing RCP applications.
It will be available in the M4 build. In the meanwhile you can check out the sources from CVS and explore the new functionality online (go to the List page).



There are still some things left to do, for more details see this bug. We would be very happy to gain feedback about how your existing drag and drop code works on RAP. In case something doesn’t work as expected, please drop us a line or open a bug.

Tags: eclipse, eclipse rap, rap, Single Sourcing, swt

As an Eclipse committer, I love to see Eclipse technology used in a variety of places.

Last week, at the EclipseRT Day in Austin, Austin Riddle and Cole Markham from the Texas Center of Applied Technology gave a presentation on how EclipseRT technology is used in emergency management and threat simulation scenarios.

They get bonus points for a Movember reference in their slides.

They also had the coolest Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) usage I have ever seen.

Cover flow widgets, sweet!

Cool huh? Feel free to browse the slides.

I encourage anyone else in the community that is working on cool stuff using Eclipse technology to tell your story if you can.

Tags: eclipse rap, eclipseRT, OSGi

We’re all looking forward to talk about EclipseRT, Equinox and RAP at the DemoCamps around the world. In case you want to catch us and talk about Eclipse and related topics, just join one of the DemoCamps near you. Besides many other interesting talks, we’ll mostly cover EclipseRT, RAP and p2.

Ottawa, ON, Canada – November 24 – Jeff McAffer (EclipseRT)
Braunschweig/Hanover, Germany – November 25 – Benjamin Muskalla (RAP)
Stuttgart, Germany – November 26 – Jordi Boehme Lopez (p2)
Kaiserslautern, Germany – November 26 – Holger Staudacher (RAP)
Frankfurt, Germany – November 26 – Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseRT,RAP)
Vienna, Austria – November 30 – Chris Anisczcyk and Jeff McAffer (RAP,EclipseRT)
Karlsruhe, Germany – December 3 – Markus Knauer, Benjamin Muskalla (EclipseRT)
Hamburg, Germany – December 4 – Jochen Krause (RAP)

I’m really looking forward to see you at the DemoCamps, as always it tends to be a lot of fun!

Tags: democamp, e4, eclipse rap, eclipseRT, equinox, helios, rap, Single Sourcing, talks

As you may read in previous blogs we have adressed the RAP styling. Therefore we presented you the “big blocks” in form of the new RAP designs. But there is still a difference between RAP and other cool RIA technologies i.e. like ExtJS, Flex or qooxdoo. When you take a look at the demos of these frameworks they all come along with cool styled widgets out of the box. Take a look at the screenshots below to see what I mean.

ExtJS Combobox

Flex buttons

qooxdoo buttons

Now lets take a look at the RAP widgets and how they are styled out of the box:

RAP default widgets

As you may see, there is a little difference between the Flex, ExtJS, qooxdoo and the RAP widgets. RAP looks almost like Windows 95. This cannot be the way RAP presents itself to the world because RAP is a modern and cool technology for building full featured RIAs. For that reason we spent some effort to show you how RAP can look like:

Modern RAP theming

From my point of view these widgets have a really fresh look and are fully competitive against all the Flex, ExtJS and qooxdoo widgets. This styling is done via theming and by using the new theming features like gradients and rounded corners heavily. We plan to set this theme as the default theme for RAP 1.3 which will be released within the Helios release train.

But there is no reason to wait. You can use the theme right now. All you have to do is:

1. Check out the latest and hottest RAP Milestone.
2. Edit your branding to use the new themes. Set the theme id to org.eclipse.rap.design.example.business.theme for the business theme or to org.eclipse.rap.design.example.fancy.theme for the fancy theme.
3. Start your application and enjoy the fresh and modern look of you widgets.

Please note that not all widgets are themed right now, but more than 80% of the widgets have the new look allready. If you have feedback for the theme please let us know by using the newsgroup or by leaving a comment.

Tags: css, eclipse, eclipse rap, helios