Towards Eclipse RAP 3.0: Getting ready for 2015

Today, the RAP project delivers the final milestone build on the way to RAP 3.0. With this new major release, we clean up deprecated API, include some new components, optimize performance and modernize the framework to make it ready for 2015.

With the new support for re-parenting, RAP can now better support the E4 workbench renderer that uses this feature excessively.

By removing support for antiquated browser versions, we were able to get rid of legacy code that dealt with the shortcomings of these old browsers. As a result we can now render pages in full standard mode instead of the so-called quirksmode.

As many other Eclipse projects, we recently decided to raise the minimal execution environment to Java 7 in RAP 3.0. Since Jetty 9 and even some parts of Equinox now depend on Java 7, it became almost impossible to run and test RAP with an older JRE. Moving to Java 7 makes our life easier and allows us to make use of some new features. With modern JREs being available even for the Raspberry PI, we think that we won’t exclude anyone by this move.

We’re also working on a number of performance optimizations, some of which are included in this milestone. For example, we removed some overhead from the startup of new UI Sessions, and we reduced the number of transient objects created during request processing to reduce load from the garbage collector. Some more of those improvements are yet to come in the next weeks.

RAP 3.0 M7 is available on the RAP download page. Now we’re entering the release candidate phase and on June 24, RAP 3.0 will be available together with the Eclipse Mars release.