Ralf is a software engineer with a history as Eclipse committer and project lead.
In recent years, he devoted himself to JavaScript technologies and helped pulling off the Tabris.js project.
Ralf holds a Master’s degree from the University of Tübingen.
Today, we’re proud and happy to announce the release of Tabris.js 2.0. This release makes Tabris.js even simpler to use, yet more flexible and powerful than ever, all while adding support for a …
The Tabris.js 2.0 release is now less than a week away (July 18). During the last preparations, we’re counting down the 10 new features in 2.0 that we’re most exited about. Number 3 is a brand new …
Tabris.js 2.0 is just two weeks away, and the development team is taking this ramp down time to reflect on the release and highlight the features we’re really excited about. A new major release gave …
There have been many notable changes to the Tabris.js codebase since Beta 2, and today we are happy to present the first release candidate of Tabris.js 2. In the last six weeks, we’ve been focused on …
The latest version of JavaScript (ES2015, or commonly called ES6) is packed with modern features, including classes, lambda expressions (“arrow functions”), block scoping, template strings, and much …
Some time ago we’ve created a draft for a Chart widget for RAP, based on the famous D3.js. Together with one of our partners, we decided to carry this work forward and make it available in the RAP …
When you need rich text editing in a RAP application, things are getting easier. You may know that there is a RichText component in the RAP Incubator. It’s around for a long time and we found it’s …
Some languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are written from right to left. The different reading direction not only affects texts, but most UI elements. Preparing software for use in those languages …
The dynamic typing in JavaScript allows for more flexibility, but it comes at the price of weaker tool support. Explicit type definitions in your code can support editors to provide more exact …
Imagine you’ve just published a new version of your app when you discover a critical bug that will render the app unusable for half of your user base. The fix may be simple, but rolling out another …
This week, the third major version of RAP, the Eclipse Remote Application Platform, has been released. As a major release, RAP 3.0 cleaned up deprecated API, allowing us to change and to optimize …
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 …
When you test components of a RAP application, you have to simulate the environment that RAP UI code normally runs in. Thanks to a new API, this becomes easier in RAP 3.0. In an earlier post, my …
Warning! This article is outdated and might not represent the current state of Tabris.js. The CollectionView is one of the most powerful widgets on iOS. On Android, there’s a similar widget called …
Often when I use SWT templates in a presentation, some people look amazed, so I thought it’s worth sharing. If you write SWT code and don’t know these templates yet, you may be wasting time typing the …
When you build jars that are supposed to work with a specific JRE version, it’s not sufficient to set the correct compiler level. Even if the compiler creates byte code for a particular language …
If you still find yourself defining methods like this public String[] getParameters(); in an interface, you should think again. Arrays are not just old-fashioned, there are good reasons to avoid …
Yes, we love building modular web applications, if they just were easier to deploy on a server! Wrapping OSGi applications in WAR files, apparently still the most popular deployment option for RAP, …
Looking back on another eventful year for the RAP project, today we’re proud to publish the results in a new release, RAP 2.2. Let’s have a look at the highlights: Client-side Scripting We started off …
When you run JUnit tests that open windows and dialogs, all these windows pop up on your screen like fireworks, making your desktop unusable for minutes. If you’re lucky enough to work on Linux, …
Earlier this year I’ve introduced Minimal JSON, a slim and fast Java library for reading and writing JSON. In contrast to object mappers such as Gson or Jackson, Minimal JSON does not more than …
As every year in June, the RAP project has released a brand new version together with the annual Eclipse release. Last year, we shipped RAP 1.5 with Eclipse Juno, this time we’re already onto Release …
In the RAP project, reading and writing JSON are critical operations, since the server processes and creates JSON messages for a large number of clients at a high rate. For this reason, we need …
Today’s our big day: RAP 2.0 is being released. Here’s my last post in this RAP 2.0 series. In my first post, I wrote about the new JSON protocol and how it connects the half objects on client and …
The Eclipse RAP Project has just launched its long-awaited 2.0 version. With this release, the project has changed its name to “Remote Application Platform” to indicate the transition from a browser …
While we are waiting for the RAP 2.0 release to be published on Monday, I’m introducing you to the most important changes in this major release. For today, I’ve picked a slightly trickier part of RAP: …
RAP 2.0 is approaching and I want to explain the most important changes in this short blog series. The key innovation of RAP 2.0 is its support for alternative clients. Today I’d like to introduce you …
There’s only one week to go until the RAP 2.0 release. In this short blog series, I’d like to introduce you to the most important changes. Besides the new protocol, the main theme in RAP 2.0 is the …
After more than six years of RAP 1.x, we will release version 2.0 on February 11. As the version number suggests, there are some substantial changes in this release. During the last few days before …
The RAP team has been working hard over the last weeks and made another milestone build for RAP 2.0 available today. RAP 2.0 M3 contains a brand new event system implementation that allowed us to get …
During the last weeks the RAP team has been busy lifting RAP’s client-to-server communication to the JSON protocol. That was a lot of work, and we finished it just in time for Kepler M2. With this …
Just in time, the first service release for RAP 1.5 has been published on Friday. It adds a dozen bugfixes to RAP 1.5. We always backport fixes very carefully in order to maintain the stability of the …
In Java, every object has a method hashCode that is simple to understand but still it’s sometimes forgotten or misused. Here are three things to keep in mind to avoid the common pitfalls. An object’s …
Update: It turned out that there is already a solution to the problem described here. The bundle org.eclipse.equinox.supplement exports the packages needed by equinox.common. This bundle is available …
Eclipse 4 is the new platform for application development in Eclipse. We already succeeded to run e4 applications on RAP two years ago, but then we got sidetracked by other efforts. Now that Eclipse …
We’re proud to announce that a new RAP release is now available for download. Together with Eclipse Juno, RAP has just published it’s version 1.5.0. RAP 1.5 comes with cool new features such as HTML …
Composite repositories make it easy to maintain different versions of a software in a single repository. The idea is to have one public p2 repository that delegates to a number of child repositories. …
RAP 1.5 includes a new API to define and start RAP applications programmatically (up to RAP 1.4, this was only possible using Eclipse extensions or web.xml properties). With this new API, RAP can also …
The RAP 1.5 M6 milestone build is packed with new features, especially for Trees and Tables. But most notably, you can now use HTML markup in Tables, Trees, and also in Labels: Just enable the markup …
Besides all the Java code in the RAP project, we also have more than 250 JavaScript files which total up to 75k lines of code. For such an amount of code, you should have some kind of code analysis …
In the RAP framework, the widgets in a website are remotely controlled by the web server. The server does this by sending messages to the client in response to Ajax requests. Until now, those messages …
If you’re interested in the latest news on RAP, consider joining us at EclipseCon Europe next week in Ludwigsburg. There are quite a number of RAP talks this year: On Thursday morning, Paul …
Update 2: The new interfaces have been renamed again in RAP 1.5M7. Please refer to this post for the details and check out the updated code example. Update: APIs have changed a bit meanwhile, so I …
The Enron Corporation was the American energy company that was involved in accounting fraud which led to the Enron scandal in 2001. During the investigation, large parts of the company’s email …
One of the new things in RAP 1.4 is the FileUpload widget in RWT, that replaces the old Upload widget from the sandbox. And there’s some more new upload stuff in the RAP Incubator. Here’s how to use …
Support for key bindings (bug 282449) has been one of the most requested features for RAP. So I’m happy to say that since 1.4 M5, RAP implements the JFace key bindings API, provides the …
Another milestone build on the way to RAP 1.4 is available: RAP 1.4 M3. In this milestone, we conentrated on optimizations to the Javascript code that we deliver to the client browser. We managed to …
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: Eventually, a …
Here’s a nice Helios feature that comes in handy when you often work with multiple workspaces simultaneously (as we recommend for developing single source application with RCP and RAP). If you do, you …
Would you like to get an overview of the best features in RAP in 5 minutes? We just stumbled across this video on YouTube that shows what a modern RAP application can look like (including some new 1.3 …
We try hard to enable a “sexy” look and feel for Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) applications. However, without rounded borders and gradients you can hardly create a website that look modern. Take this …
Enabling RCP applications to work with different locales is an essential requirement for server-side Eclipse setups. Multiple users are accessing the same instance of a running application …
Did you notice that two out of the three finalists for the Eclipse Community Awards in the category “Best Commercial Equinox Applications” are based on RAP? One is a web-based customer relationship …
The Eclipse RAP project has set out to realize the idea of “single sourcing”, i.e. to develop software for different target platforms from a common code base. The increasing popularity of mobile …