RAP 3.0 Release Schedule Update

We have recently updated the RAP 3.0 release plan, it is now going to ship together with the Eclipse Mars release train in June 2015. I would like to provide some insight into this unusual update.

As you may know, RAP was released in 6 month cycles for the past 2 years, adding a in-between winter release to the simultaneous Eclipse releases. That allowed us to get new features out to you faster, and focus on more specific themes for the releases. This was the plan for 3.0 as well: Releasing it this December with the main goal to remove/clean-up API and replace public classes and methods that have become obsolete. However, it turned out that we have not yet finished providing new APIs for all use cases that our user base came up with, meaning that we can’t yet remove the old APIs.

Normally, we’d rather leave out new features and deliver on schedule. However, with our policy of only allowing API changes with major release versions, we would be forced to release another major version next summer. We feel that reliability and stability are, and should continue to be, one of RAPs most important strengths, and therefore decided to defer the release date until the Eclipse Mars release in June 2015. We apologize to all of you who already planned on a release date this winter. Please see this as part of our commitment to a quality framework with stable APIs.