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Using Eclipse Ganymede to develop for the desktop, Web and mobile devices, Part 2: Developing for the Rich Client Platform, the Ganymede way

RAP: The new way to the Web

Suresh Krishna, Software Developer, Freelance Developer

Suresh Krishna has been a programmer since 2000 and has been working on the domain modeling, IDEs, and productivity tools. Inspired by the IDE evolution and developer productivity, he works primarily on the Eclipse plug-ins and RCP applications. Extreme Programming and Scrum are his favorites, along with evangelizing Eclipse to the user, developer, and corporate communities. He enjoys his free time writing blogs and product evaluations.

Trebor Fenstermaker, Software Consultant, Sunnyside Avenue Software, LLC

Although he's programmed in Java since 1999, Trebor Fenstermaker was, for much of that time, highly suspicious of Java IDEs and was a die-hard command-line user, even doing all his code editing in vi -- until a colleague showed him that he really could be more efficient with Eclipse. He now evangelizes his fellow UNIX command-line refugees on its wonders and enjoys exploring its more powerful features -- including its endless possibilities for expansion through custom plug-ins.

Summary: The Ganymede release of the Eclipse IDE includes 24 separate projects, covering a wide range of technologies. Many of these projects are mature, and this release provides incremental improvements to those. But Ganymede also includes a number of new projects that introduce new technologies to the Eclipse platform. In this three-part "Using Eclipse Ganymede to develop for the desktop, Web and mobile devices" tutorial series, we will cover the following new Ganymede features: RCP, RAP, and eRCP, which allow you to develop software for the desktop, Web, and mobile platforms, respectively, with one common code base; Subversion for version control; and p2 for update and installation. Here in Part 2, we will take the personal organizer developed in Part 1 and modify it to use the new Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) to package and distribute the application on the Web.

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Date: 09 Sep 2008
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (3687 KB | 46 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 14399 views
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Before you start

This tutorial is for any Eclipse developer who wants to learn how to take code written using the mature Rich Client Platform (RCP) and modify it to use the new Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) to allow for a rich-client experience distributed over the Web. You should have an understanding of the Eclipse platform and some familiarity with the idea of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Also, you should have knowledge of how to configure a servlet container and deploy applications on it.

About this series

Part 1 provides an introduction to the new features of the RCP, the new Subversion Eclipse integration, and the p2 packaging and distribution system. Part 2 introduces the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) to write applications for the Web. And Part 3 discusses how to use the embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP) to develop an application for a mobile device.

About this tutorial

The Ganymede release of the Eclipse IDE bundles more than 20 new and existing projects under the Eclipse umbrella. In Part 1 of this three-part series, you looked at some features added to make development easier, including support for Subversion and a new distribution model for plug-ins called p2. You also saw some incremental improvements in the mature Rich Client Platform (RCP) by developing a simple personal task organizer plug-in application, then storing it in Subversion and deploying it via p2.

Another exciting addition to Ganymede is the inclusion of the Rich Application Platform (RAP). RAP is a way to build rich client applications — stateful GUI applications similar to those developed for a desktop — and deploy them for use on the Web. RAP brings the Eclipse programming model to the Web, allowing you to reuse much of your existing RCP code when building RAP-based applications. This is done using Ajax, but Eclipse makes it simple to build on the knowledge you already have of developing desktop applications with the RCP. To demonstrate, you will modify the personal organizer developed in Part 1 to use RAP.

Topics include:

How to download and install the RAP environment to Eclipse
How to migrate your existing RCP code to RAP
How to factor your code for the Web
How to package and deploy your code to a Web server

System requirements

Eclipse Ganymede: Find Eclipse Ganymede at the Eclipse Foundation.

Java 2 Standard Edition: The Java™ 2 Standard Edition V5 or greater is available from Sun Microsystems.

Eclipse RAP: The Eclipse RAP plug-in is available in the Eclipse Foundation RAP section at Eclipse.org.

Apache Tomcat: For deploying the finished RAP application to a stand-alone servlet container, this tutorial uses Apache Tomcat. Download the latest stable version.

Comments

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TutorialTitle=Using Eclipse Ganymede to develop for the desktop, Web and mobile devices, Part 2: Developing for the Rich Client Platform, the Ganymede way

publish-date=09092008

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