After the Helios Release, we are one step closer to Indigo. RAP 1.4 M1 is now available. From the new features, here are my personal top three:

1. We have a new implementation of the SWT Tree widget which is faster, more flexible, and provides many new features.
   
2. In order to support new application servers that already ship with Servlet API (javax.servlet.*) 3.0, RAP is now able to leverage the new Servlet specification. Deploying RAP on application servers like Tomcat 7 or Glassfish 3 is now possible.
3. Since RAP 1.3 you can easily use IApplications instead of IEntryPoints. With this milestone the RAP launcher supports choosing and launching IApplications.
   

• Check out the complete New and Noteworthy for M1.
• Get RAP 1.4 M1 from the RAP download site

Tags: eclipse, indigo, new and noteworthy, rap

After another 6 weeks of working hard towards the Helios Release, we are one step closer. RAP 1.3 M7 for Eclipse 3.6 is out. From the new features, here are my personal top three:

1. Eventually, a GraphicsContext implementation that lets you draw onto the browser using SWT API! In the early days of RAP, we regarded this as being impossible.
   
2. Animations support in CSS enables cool effects like sliding menus, fading tooltips, and more.
   
3. Vertical-only grid lines make Tables with alternating row colors look much clearer. I had this feature on my todo list for almost one year.
   

• Check out the complete New and Noteworthy for M7.
• Get RAP M7 from the RAP download site or
• Get the M7 Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers package that includes everything you need to develop RCP and RAP applications.

Tags: helios, new and noteworthy, rap

Animations are an integral part of most modern UIs, including many “web 2.0″-applications and websites. (Just watch carefully when opening google.com.) They have become so common that we even subconsciously miss them if they aren’t there. The transition between two states of an UI should never be sudden, but gradually (albeit quickly), as we are used from real life. If done right, this increases usability without attracting too much attention or slow down the user. Ideally one isn’t even aware of the effect, it only feels more organic and natural.

Therefore we now integrated the core functionality needed for such animations into RAP. Since the existing client-implementation of RAP was not written with such a feature in mind, it was considerable effort to do this without changing much of the existing code. And for the same reason, there are currently some limitations on what we can do with this feature. However the groundwork is done, and we hope to expand on that in the future.

Just like with gradients and rounded borders before, you can expect the number of supported widgets and effects to grow. You should keep in mind though, that this feature is meant only for subtle animations that seamlessly integrate into the UI. We can and will not turn RAP into some kind of multimedia powerhouse where everything is moving all the time.

For now, “Button”, “Menu”, “ToolTip” and “Shell-DisplayOverlay” each have one effect that can be enabled. This is done using RAPs CSS-theming, not Java, as this kind of animations are mainly eye-candy and don’t add any functionality. The syntax for this is based on a small and easy-to-use subset of the CSS3 working draft for animations. For example:

Button[PUSH] {
  animation: hoverIn 350ms ease, hoverOut 600ms ease-in;
}

This generates a faded hover-effect for buttons.

Animations work on all browser supported by RAP, but might not run smoothly on very old machines. They will be part of the upcoming 1.3M7 build. To see what we can do for now, check out the new “Theming”-Page in our examples-demo.

Tags: new and noteworthy, rap, theming

I have to admit, I’m a little nervous what happens with the RAP community after this post. At least for me, the last days were pretty exciting. Some days ago, Ivan from the RAP team committed the initial support for a GC (GraphicsContext) for RAP. Currently restricted to the Canvas widget, the GC provides thousands of new use cases for RAP applications. The work by Ivan and Tim is just gorgeous and will help many developers to single-source their applications with even less exceptions. In case you want to try it out in this second without reading further, just fire up the RAP Examples demo and draw something yourself

Credits for the picture above goes to Holger with the aim to come up with a new RAP project logo After using the GC the first time in the Examples demo, I thought about other possibilities to test the new GC. My first thought: custom widgets? Tired of writing custom widgets in JavaScript? Get your Canvas and single-source your custom widget with RCP by writing an owner-draw widget. But as it was late in the night, I decided to just reuse some existing owner-drawn widgets like those we can find in the Nebula project. After getting the PShelf widget from CVS, it was only a matter of seconds until I started my first RAP application using an owner-drawn Nebula widget:

And I think I know what most of you are currently thinking – Draw2D, GEF and GMF on RAP? To keep it and short and simple: No! While it may be possible to single source Draw2D with the exisiting Canvas, I’m pretty sure it will not scale. The way Draw2D is implemented will cause major performance problems with the browser-side Canvas widget. As I said, it may be possible but not really preferable. For supporting Draw2D the right technology on the client-side is there. Only on the server-side we would need APIs that entirely hide the GC. Thus we could directly translate from one vector-based technology to the other.

I’m pretty excited to see how the community can profit from the new Canvas implementation. Want to try it out? Either get the current RAP runtime from CVS or wait some days until we can publish RAP M7 (which has several other cool new & noteworthy items).

Tags: canvas, draw2d, eclipseRT, gef, helios, nebula, new and noteworthy, rap, Single Sourcing

Tags: eclipse, eclipsecon, emf, helios, new and noteworthy, rap, Single Sourcing, talks

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: fancy, helios, milestone, new and noteworthy, rap, 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, 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: new and noteworthy, rap