RAP

I promised to write about the project I'm currently working for. Now is a good time to do so. We've just released the second Milestone on our way to 1.0 and this week RAP will be presented at the EclipseCon. RAP stands for Rich AJAX Platform, it is a quite young Eclipse project, still in its validation phase. You've probably heard about AJAX, the base technology for all the cool and fresh Web 2.0 sites. In short, it's a technology that allows to reload small portions of a web page instead of reloading the whole page after every click. This trick enables web pages for much more interactive features. Entry fields that open up on a click, result lists that are filtered as you type and the like... The problem is that coding large amounts of JavaScript is dreadful. No type safety, no encapsulation, a lousy object model, bad tooling etc. It's just no fun. Consequently, there aren't many good JS programmers around. But everybody wants AJAX now. Wouldn't it be great to write AJAX-enabled web applications without having to deal with JavaScript? Writing web applications in plain Java using a well known API like SWT? Enjoying all the comforts of a first-class Java IDE? Well, that's what RAP tries to accomplish. And hey, if this is possible, why not present the user an Eclipse Workbench inside the browser? Sounds crazy? Ok, it's still a long work until there, but doesn't this screenshot remind you of the Workbench somehow? That's what I currently spend my days with. If you like, check out our demo application at at http://rap.innoopract.com/rap.