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.