Eclipse RCP and AJAX

2008-05-14T22:16:00+02:00

Some time ago, I've discovered an Eclipse project which sounds interesting to me. This project aims at providing an AJAX runtime target for Eclipse RCP applications. I didn't have more time but to play a little with the public demos. Thus I still wondered what is the gap for an Eclipse RCP applications developper before starting to create a RAP application.

Today I had some time to have a look at the sources of a RAP application project. There is quite nothing more to do if you are already programming Eclipse RCP applications as the differences are:

Adding the org.eclipse.rap.ui plugin to the dependencies.
Importing the javax.servlet and javax.servlet.http packages
Add an org.eclipse.rap.ui.entrypoint extension to define the RAP application entry point

To internationalization of a RAP application works also differently from the standard Eclipse internationalization. This is described in the RAP on-line help: internationalizing a RAP application shouldn't be a huge problem.

A RAP application can even be packaged in a WAR file as any other web application. There is no wizard to perform this, but a sample Eclipse feature projects with Ant build scripts are available on the Eclipse CVS. There is also generic Equinox documentation on that topic at http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/server/http_in_container.php.

Thus creating a standard Web application by using the JFace and SWT APIs is quite easy. When combined with Spring-OSGi, let us imagine creating powerful and sexy Web applications.

The only thing I still would like to see before being a RAP fan is a benchmark of an application used by hundreds or thousands of users. Does it make a difference with toolkits like GWT or YUI? Can I use RAP for business applications used every day by a whole company?

The Gecko and the Gull

2007-05-04T08:22:00+02:00

Is it a unknown fable from La Fontaine? Not really, in fact it has more to do about OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. I was trying to tamper with some web pages and I wanted to check whether we could integrate easily a small web-browser inside OpenOffice.org.

Hopefully, there is an interesting feature coming up with Eclipse 3.3 which helps a lot: SWT provides the ability to create a Browser composite which runs the xulrunner (downloads). This means that we could perfectly imagine a small Java extension to OpenOffice.org which provides a UNO service to show any XUL or HTML page.

Here is a small snippet I created to test this on windows:

Display display = Display.getDefault();
final Shell shell = new Shell(display);
shell.setText("My OOo Browser");
shell.setSize(400, 300);
shell.setLayout(new GridLayout());

System.setProperty("org.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath", 
    "C:\\Documents and Settings\\Cbosdonnat\\Mes documents\\xulrunner");

Browser browser = new Browser(shell, SWT.MOZILLA);
browser.setLayoutData(new GridData(GridData.FILL_BOTH));
browser.setUrl("http://fr.openoffice.org");

shell.open();

while (!shell.isDisposed ()) {
    if (!display.readAndDispatch ()) display.sleep ();
}
display.dispose ();

I let you imagine the kind of interesting applications we could do using this... Of course the same principle is working on Linux and I would like to test it on MacOS, but I let you translate the above code for it.

Cédric Bosdonnat - Eclipse

Eclipse RCP and AJAX

The Gecko and the Gull