RAP, Top Eclipse Luna Feature #6

Eclipse Luna will ship in 1 week. While some of the development teams are putting their final bits in place, many committers have decided to celebrate by going to EclipseCon France. Toulouse is a long way from British Columbia, so I’m celebrating the Eclipse Release by counting down the 10 Eclipse Luna Features that I’m most excited about. Number 6 on my list is all the great improvements to the RAP Project that were completed over the past 12 months.

The Eclipse RAP project has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 2006. Originally a platform for Rich Ajax applications, RAP has transitioned into a general purpose remote application platform. In addition to the web client, RAP now supports mobile clients and a desktop client is currently under development.

Over the past year, a number of improvements have been added to RAP. The file upload dialog now supports Drag and Drop. You can drag a file directly from your desktop to your RAP application.

The RAP DropDown widget has also been moved from the incubator. The DropDown widget allows you to open a list of elements relative to another widget. When used with the Text Widget and the incubating AutoSuggest, you get a powerful auto complete widget for the web.

During the past year, the RAP team also developed a powerful template mechanism for tables. Instead of simple grids, row templates allow you to layout all aspects of each row. Images can be aligned in different positions, elements can be aligned relative to each other, and areas can be designated as ‘selectable’.

Finally, there are a number of smaller improvements such as improved tooltips, a new singleton API, better entry point support and more.

Follow me on Twitter for more Eclipse Tips & Tricks as I count down my Top 10 Luna Features.