The new and improved RAP Developer’s Guide
Behold, finally a big update to the RAP Developer’s Guide! After neglecting it a bit in the last release, the RAP team worked hard to get it in shape for Juno. With a lof of the information on RAP scattered around in blogbosts, forum entries, wiki pages and javadocs, newcomer (and in some case experts) might have a hard time to puzzle out how this or that works in RAP. I would find it really annoying if we alienated potential adopers because of this, or if some of RAPs features would go stale because nearly no one knows about them.
In my opinion, even with a complex piece of software like RAP, a good documentation should make it easy for any seasoned Java developer to pick it up and quickly use it to its fullest. I think we are a lot closer to this now. And best of all, the guide can finally be viewed on the RAP homepage.
Here are some of the major additions:
- New chapters „Setting up the Eclipse IDE“ and „Installing a RAP Target„, explaining in more detail and simple terms the different ways to to setup the IDE and target platform.
- There is a new section „RAP Widget Toolkit“. It explains what RWT is, what it can do more than SWT and what its limitations are. There are also detailed discussions on key and mouse events, and on the different scopes used in RAP.
- Certainly among the most important additions: The article „Choosing an Application Setup“ explains the different modes and environments RAP can run in. „Application Configuration“ and „RWT Standalone“ (and the retained „Branding“) then build on that and go into more detail.
Most of the other articles have also been slightly revised.
These changes are part of an ongoing effort to improve the environment and overall presentation of the RAP project. You might have noticed that the RAP homepage has been improved several times in the last months, (adding some content to the landing page just a few days ago), and the Wiki was also cleaned up a bit. Finally, we plan to blog and twitter more to keep everyone up to date and interested.