Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe » rap

Eclipse RAP Application Wins U.S. Government Award

Chris Aniszczyk — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:37:36 +0000

I was just notified by a friend that an Eclipse-based Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) application won the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Impact Award!

The application that one was featured in Austin Riddle’s EclipseCon 2010 presentation, entitled Eclipse to the Rescue. The application provides immediate access to crucial, real-time information concerning biological events around the world. It’s always nice to see Eclipse-based applications having a positive impact at a government level and winning awards while doing it.

Anyways, congratulations guys!

Developing RAP Applications

Chris Aniszczyk — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:35:00 +0000

An article that Benjamin Muskalla and I wrote about developing RAP applications just got published. This covers some of the basics that weren’t covered in Part 1 and expands on some advanced topics like branding, themes and custom widgets.

If you’re an Eclipse developer and are shy about developing web/ajax applications, this is your chance to get acquainted! Other than that, happy rapping!

Have you submitted something to EclipseCon?

Chris Aniszczyk — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 04:48:00 +0000

EclipseCon 2008 is closing submissions on Monday, November 19th so there’s not much time left to submit something. The PDE team has submitted its annual plug-in development tutorials:

Being on the EclipseCon Program Committee, I’m going to do my best to try something new this year with the tutorial order. I’m thinking that the introductory Plug-in Development tutorials done by the PDE team should take place in the morning. In the afternoon, there will be a tutorial on eRCP followed by one on RAP. This effectively would allow a tutorial attendee to get a taste of three different runtime environments that Eclipse targets:

Desktop (RCP)
Embedded (eRCP)
Server (RAP)

Where else can you do that? This also traces the evolution of Eclipse from just being some tooling platform to a viable runtime for various types of applications. It’s my hope that the tutorial attendees who went through this track of tutorials would come away that Eclipse isn’t just about tools anymore and that there’s a lot of power in reusing your skills and assets to develop against three different runtime environments. All of this in just one day!

Do people think this is a good idea? If so, I’ll see what I can do to make it happen.

Oh, and please submit something to EclipseCon if you haven’t already

RAP and PDE?

Chris Aniszczyk — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:21:00 +0000

RAP makes me giggle.

I completely forgot about a demo that Frank Appel from the RAP team showed me at a restaurant during the Equinox Summit. I recall talking to Frank over a beer when he showed me a PDE plug-in (org.eclipse.pde.runtime) running within RAP:

RAP is all over the place

Chris Aniszczyk — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:14:00 +0000

*bzzzt*
*bzzzt*
*bzzzt*
*bzzzt*

My blackberry won’t stop vibrating this morning with all the news alerts about RAP:

Congratulations RAP team!

Dirty Words and New Articles

Chris Aniszczyk — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:22:00 +0000

While reading the Eclipse newsgroups this morning, I came across someone using one of my dirty words. Hrmmm passivation, I wonder what their background is as a developer.

Oh, there are some new Eclipse articles out. The first is pretty snazzy article on eJFace which is part of the eRCP project. It’s like JFace, but for more constrained environments. The other article is a simple introduction I did for Eclipse Forms to help spread the word.

The next stop on the article train for me is a two-part article series with Benjamin Muskalla about the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). The first part will be a basic introduction to RAP including some demos, setting up your environment for development and a simple example to work with. The second part will include more advanced topics like theming and creating your own widgets for use within RAP. Look for these articles in a couple weeks to coincide with the launch of RAP!

On a side note, I noticed the RAP team posted the famous RCP Mail example as an online demo.

Web development revisited

Chris Aniszczyk — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 00:02:00 +0000

After having a rough morning and cheering myself up by reading cuteoverload.com (freaky animatronic cats make me giggle), I started to work on an upcoming series of Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) articles. If you haven’t toyed with RAP, I suggest you try it out… because it’s one of the coolest things I played with in awhile. I mean, check this screenshot out below… that’s the famous PDE “RCP Mail” example running within RAP pretty much unmodified:

Even though I believe web development is so 90′s, this type of stuff where you mix the things we come to love within Eclipse (extension registry, good modularity and versioning concepts, etc…) with “web 2.0″ elements is the future of web development. Web development the Eclipse way ?

If you step back for a second and ponder about it… we may have to revisit the way think about developing applications due to the success of OSGi. It is now possible to structure an application so that you can have core code that could run various environments: an embedded device / cell phone (eRCP), desktop (RCP) and web (RAP) without modification. This core code will serve as the bottom layer for your application. The next step would be divided into two pieces: UI bits that work on all or some of those platforms, and UI bits specific for those environments.

In the end, you have a “hybrid application” if you put these elements together and you have quite a bit of code and skills re-use. Imagine developing an application that runs on the new Nokia S60, within an Eclipse RCP application and also on the web via RAP. Kind of cool eh?