05 Dec 2017
Good keyboard controls have become a staple of modern web applications, such as Google Mail, Github (press “?”) and Flickr. However, almost every browser implements key events slightly differently, all with some quirks, and none of them like in SWT. For this reason, key events in RAP had, until recently, several issues and limitations. That is a thing of the past now, as the key events implementation has been largely rewritten in RAP 1.5M5, and now finally works reliably. This also brings some general changes to RAP key event handling.
- Some keys that didn’t work at all (like arrow-keys in Firefox), work fine now. This also fixes the JFace Content Proposal.
- Several non-alphanumeric keys had the wrong keycode, those are fixed.
- Key events are no longer blocking the UI when sending the Ajax request to the server.
- There is now a feature called “active keys”, which makes it possible to drastically reduce traffic traffic. It was already present in RAP 1.4, but has been greatly improved.
- Another new feature is called “cancel keys”. It allows to suppress the browsers and widgets default operations associated with any given key.
- The “cancel keys” replace the now-defunct support for the
doit
flag on key events.
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