To participate in the life cycle - what is what we want to do with our custom widget - we need to provide a Life Cycle Adapter (LCA). There are two ways to connect the LCA with our widget. On the one hand side we can return it directly when someone asks our widget with getAdapter to provide an LCA. This can be done by implementing the getAdapter method in our own widget like this:


...
public Object getAdapter( Class adapter ) {
Object result;
if( adapter == ILifeCycleAdapter.class ) {
result = new MyCustomWidgetLCA(); // extends AbstractWidgetLCA
} else {
result = super.getAdapter( adapter );
}
return result;
}
...

The preferred way is to let RAP do this itself by creating the LCA class in a package called <widgetpackage>.internal.<widgetname>kit.<widgetname>LCA. The order of the internal does not play the big role. The important thing is to have internal in the package name, the package with the LCA is called <widgetname>kit and the LCA itself is called <widgetname>LCA.
Here a little example:
If our widget is named org.eclipse.rap.gmaps.GMap,
then our LCA should be named org.eclipse.rap.internal.gmaps.gmapkit.GMapLCA.
The LCA class itself must have org.eclipse.rwt.lifecycle.AbstractWidgetLCA as the super class and implement its abstract methods.