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
Whenever I’m working on UI stuff, something always goes terribly wrong 
Sometimes it’s only a margin or padding, other times it a composite that crosses my path. I was pretty happy that Chris Aniszczyk and Simon Archer hacked together Picasso, which helps you to identify some of these layout issues. As you may know, most of the time I work on the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and come across the same issues. As Picasso was originally intended to work for RCP, it’s not a long way to get it working for RAP.
In case you’re struggling with these issues too – and working on RAP applications, please add your vote to bug 267975 so we can use Picasso on both runtimes.
Tags: layout, pde, picasso, rap, Single Sourcing, tips, ui
With e4 0.9 out in the wild, we should think again about the goals e4 tries to provide. One of them was to reduce the gap between Desktop and Web – not only speaking of reusing widgets but also to enable the platform handle multi-user scenarios. While the core e4 team concentrated on eliminating bad smells like singletons, the RAP team worked on better support for single sourcing applications in general. With an experimental version of RAP which includes some features not yet in the current release, we were able to run the demo out of the box including the whole underlying infrastructure like the modeled workbench – without touching the e4 code.
If you take a look at the RAP Demos page you’ll find the e4 contacts demo running on RAP. If you want to try it out yourself or even help to contribute to this effort, take a look this wiki page. In case you’re interested what you can do with e4, be sure to participate in the e4 webinars.This week, there will be Part 2 with topics like RAP, the Compatibility layer and the flexible resources model. Looking at the questions that came up in the last RAP webinar and the first part of the E4 webinar, people seem to be very interested how e4 and RAP play together. I’ll try to answer the open questions during the webinar this week. Looking forward to a great event.
Tags: databinding, e4, rap, Single Sourcing, swt
This Thursday (July 9th), there will be a webinar on the topic of single sourcing and in particular, extending Rich Client Platform (RCP) applications to the web using the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) project.
Don’t know what single sourcing is all about? Well, if we look at the traditional definition from the publishing industry:
Sounds like a good idea?
How about we take that a step further and talk about source code and runtime environments:
In our definition of single sourcing, you’re able to take desktop applications built with RCP and run them on the web using RAP. During the webinar, Ralf Sternberg and Ruediger Herrmann will explore the differences between RAP and RCP that are especially relevant to the goal of single sourcing as much code as possible. This means that you’re able to reuse a lot of code and skills in single sourcing projects. If you’re still a bit fuzzy on the topic, a concrete example of single sourcing in practice was the Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT) project:
So what are you waiting for, please register for the webinar!
Tags: eclipse, rap, rcp, Single Sourcing, webinar
“A picture is worth a thousand words” – a true story.
The technology for impressive charts and reports already has a name in the mindset of Eclipse enthusiasts – it’s BIRT. But with the growing number of RAP applications in the wild, there is a big demand to integrate such technologies like BIRT into RAP applications. If you want to have nice colorful charts and good looking reports in your RAP application, why don’t you just drop in to the talk of Virgil Dodson and me about integrating BIRT into RAP. It’s not that hard, believe me!
We will give you advice how to avoid some of the common pitfalls and show you the possibilities you have to tweak your reports. Even if you want to single source your application with RCP, you can still use all the existing BIRT features as you know them. If you’re not yet familiar with the features of RAP itself, I think Ralf and Rüdiger would be glad to explain you all the details with hands-on examples in their tutorial on Monday.
It’s going to be a great conference. Register now and we’ll see you there.
Tags: BIRT, eclipsecon, rap, Single Sourcing
