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?