If you haven’t seen it in the Eclipse announcements: Galileo SR2 is available for download from eclipse.org. From this page you can download the new EPP packages that are based on Galileo SR2 (Service Release) and Eclipse 3.5.2.

Or, if you don’t want to download the full packages, you can start an upgrade – that’s what I did just a few minutes ago. I started with an older working copy of Eclipse (probably something from Galileo SR1) and started the upgrade process (‘Help’ > ‘Check for Update’).

It takes a while until p2 fetches all the required metadata from several repositories. The list includes the EPP package repository with the package definitions, the main Galileo repository and the Eclipse Platform repository. A few Okay-clicks later, p2 started to download the new content and asked me some more minutes later to restart Eclipse. Et voilà – after that restart I had a brand-new Eclipse with the latest version without downloading a new package.

Tags: eclipse, galileo, new and noteworthy, p2, SR2

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

As Holger already mentioned in his blog post, part of the milestone is a new design option for RAP applications. You can either use it as is or customize it depending on your needs.

Together with the new fancy design, there is also a new Configuration dialog to enable and disable the view actions per stack. Additionally we added an effect called Lightbox which occurs when the dialog is open.

Another thing I’m pretty excited about – the help system. The RAP runtime doesn’t provide everything you need for the whole help system, we just provide the infrastructure to plug in any help system implementation you want. Depending on your needs you can either use a pretty simple implementation or single-source the real help system implementation (org.eclipse.help.ui) yourself (great chance to get involved by the way).

For those of you who are working a lot with tabular data, we now provide cell tooltips on the TableViewer if you use a CellLabelProvider. This enables you to provide tooltips on the fly for all of your table cells.

Looking at this milestone in numbers, we fixed 100 bugs and resolved 36 enhancements – this includes another 23 new APIs that are now available for you. We’re pretty excited about the Helios release and looking forward to the next milestone.

Be sure to check out the whole New & Noteworthy as there are much more details we added in M2!

Tags: eclipse rap, fancy, helios, milestone, new and noteworthy, Single Sourcing

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, eclipse rap, galileo, memory, new and noteworthy, performance, rap

Riena 3.5.M6 is available, just in time for EclipseCon (new and noteworthy). 

The Riena highlights at the conference next week:

• Come to the Riena BOF on Tuesday to discuss the project with the team. As one of the committers behind the UI (Ridgets), I’m looking forward to feedback from developers who consume it or are thinking about using it.
• If you’re new to Riena I highly recommend Christian’s talk  ’Write a Client/Server application based on Riena in 25 minutes‘  on Wednesday. Christian shows how to write a Riena app quickly including creating the UI, using Ridgets, easy data-binding and access to the server with Remote Services. It’s a quick, hands-on overview of what Riena is about.
   
• The Riena talk I’m most curious about is Ekke’s and Florian’s presentation ‘Dynamic View for Business Applications (Riena + EMF + oAW)‘ on Thursday. Ekke and Florian are two of the most active members of the Riena community. As far as I can tell they have written a model-driven UI-generator based on Riena+EMF+oAW. Update 3/19: you can read more details here. I’m looking forward to their talk.

See you at EclipseCon,

Elias.

Tags: eclipse ui, eclipsecon, new and noteworthy, riena

We shipped RAP 1.2 Milestone 2 this week. 

New and noteworthy items include:

• several new widgets (DateTime, ExpandBar, Scale, MessageBox)
• support for changing the cursor style (Control.setCursor(…))
• improved java script compression (reducing the size by 20%).

You can download RAP 1.2 M2 here.

Tags: eclipse rap, new and noteworthy

As Neil pointed out in Having fun with RAP and OSGi there is a challenge for us rappers: Provide a look & feel of RAP applications suitable for the web. We do not claim that we are completely there, but introducing the PresentationFactory is a big step forward.

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.

Tags: eclipse rap, new and noteworthy

The RAP team just announced the availability of RAP 1.1 M3.

Some new things in this release:

UI

• Mouse Events – Controls will notify mouse listeners on mouse up, down and double-click events.
• Theming Variants – Define multiple theming styles for the for the same widget type. Want blue buttons and green buttons? Now you can do it.
• Background Images – You can now use a background image on most controls.
• Transparency – Semi-transparent Shells (#get/setAlpha()).
• Activities - Control the visibility of certain UI elements in the Workbench using the familiar activities and activitySupport extension points.
• Import and Export Wizards – Support for registering and showing import and export wizards.

Core

• User Specific Settings - RWT provides API for persisting session- and/or user-specific settings. Refer to ISettingStore for details.
• User Specific Preferences – You can now use AbtractUIPlugin.getPreferenceStore() to save and retrieve user-specific preferences. The user is identified by a cookie and will have access to the same preferences as long as the cookie is valid.
• RAP HttpContext – The RAP servlet uses its own HttpContext. This allows easier sharing of session data between the RAP Servlet and other servlets in the same context.

Here are the links to the release announcement and the complete new & noteworthy.

Image: (c) Copyright 2005, flowin2/Photocase.de

Tags: eclipse rap, new and noteworthy

My colleagues from the RAP Team have created proof-of-concept implementation of a web-enabled Draw2D port. This could eventually allow you to port existing graphical applications based on the GEF/Draw2D frameworks to the web.

Click here to watch the video.

So will this be available as part of Eclipse RAP soon?

No, this work was intended as a feasibility study. At this point we are looking for parties that are interested in using and productizing this technology.

Regards,
Elias.

Tags: eclipse rap, new and noteworthy, video

RAP 1.0 has been released and you’ve probably heard about it already, as it was well covered by blogs and press alike. Read on for a couple for helpful items, which didn’t make the New & Noteworthy, as they are not part of the RAP Target Platform, but available through the RAP SDK Feature.

The RAP SDK Feature adds a bunch of RAP-specific tooling to your Eclipse IDE and can be installed from this update site:

http://download.eclipse.org/rt/rap/update-site

Tags: eclipse rap, new and noteworthy