| History of RAP [message #59856] |
Wed, 14 November 2007 17:57  |
Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: juergen.frings.freenet.de
Hello,
IŽm preparing a lesson about RAP. The Focus is not on how to implement
Applications with RAP but on the developmentprocesses of such Application
Frameworks.
Now IŽm looking for Information on how this all began.
I read, that the RWT has come out of the W4t-Toolkit of you guys at
Innoopract.
But I can hardly find any information on this all.
Is there a Document describing a little bit about all that?
Thanks in advance!
Jürgen Frings
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| Re: History of RAP [message #60082 is a reply to message #59856] |
Thu, 15 November 2007 22:00  |
| Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: jkrause.innoopract.com
Hi Jürgen,
Here you go with some RAP history:
RWT has indeed evolved from Innoopracts W4T technology, W4T stands for
"www windowing toolkit". The first release of W4T was in December 2001,
and it was our goal to make Java web development easier. This was not en
vogue at that time, most of the Java crowd liked the complexity ;-)
We created a visual design tool for W4T as an Eclipse plugin - W4T
Eclipse. W4T Eclipse became pretty popular with some groups as it
simplified the creation of Java web apps quite a bit.
However, W4T was not a standard and we had an eye on JSF, which took
almost forever to complete. We created a JSF compatible implementation
that we dumped again, because we thought that the API of the components
is almost impossible to understand for a Java (the language) developer.
At least, we implemented a lifecycle management similar to that of JSF
for W4T and moved ahead in 2005 to ajaxify the library. With the new
Ajax capabilities we thought about enabling a workbench and plug-in
based development approach for web applications. We successfully
implemented proof of concepts for a "web workbench" as well as running
osgi within a webcontainer in the summer of 2005. All of that was still
based on the W4T api.
The RAP project was proposed in March 2006, and became an Eclipse
project in late June 2006. It was still the plan to create a workbench
implementation with W4T as widget toolkit. We realized pretty quickly
that the Eclipse community preferred the SWT api for various valid
reasons (not because W4T api was bad, but for code reuse, skill
preservation, ...). So we began to re-implement the component layer with
mostly SWT api and qooxdoo on the client side. Based on ongoing
community feedback and after aligning with Steve Northover we decided in
March 2007 to make RWT a subset of SWT.
That was the short version ;-). With respect to the development process
of the Application framework the most notable thing in my eyes was the
adoption of Eclipse APIs during the development. Even in the W4T days we
had a JFace implementation (not fully API compatible). We decided at
some point to innovate around an existing application framework that we
think is very powerful (osgi, rcp), even if we don't agree with
everything. If you want to get more info on how Eclipse as an
application framework has evolved there are some great (old) slides by
Jim de Rivieres. Erich Gamma and others. I don't have them handy but I
think I could dig them out.
Cheers, Jochen
Jürgen wrote:
> Hello,
>
> IŽm preparing a lesson about RAP. The Focus is not on how to implement
> Applications with RAP but on the developmentprocesses of such
> Application Frameworks.
>
> Now IŽm looking for Information on how this all began.
>
> I read, that the RWT has come out of the W4t-Toolkit of you guys at
> Innoopract.
> But I can hardly find any information on this all.
> Is there a Document describing a little bit about all that?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Jürgen Frings
>
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| Re: History of RAP [message #60244 is a reply to message #60082] |
Sun, 18 November 2007 11:29 |
| Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: juergen.frings.freenet.de
Hi Jochen,
wow, very nice and quite interesting!!
Thank you very much for your effort!
Jürgen
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