Persiflage and Piffle

Some may argue that the development and release of the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform is a pointless waste of energy; why on earth should we need to learn yet another way of building AJAX apps - don’t we have enough already?

The point here is that, if you already know how to write Eclipse applications there’s very little you need to learn :

The RAP project enables developers to build rich, Ajax-enabled Web applications by using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins with the well known Eclipse workbench extention points and a widget toolkit with SWT API (plus JFace).

So, if you already know SWT and JFace, if you understand how to write Eclipse plugins and how to package them together to create an application, then you’ve got a very small amount to learn to be able to package your application as a rich web app.

To get an idea of what it can do, have a look at the web versions of (reasonably) well known RCP mail demo and the example SWT (or rather RWT) controls demo.

Pretty neat, eh?

I spotted the announcement of Riena on Wayne’s blog.

The Riena platform will be the foundation for building multi-tier enterprise client/server applications. As such Riena will broaden the usage of the service oriented architecture of OSGi/Equinox by providing access to local and remote services in a transparent way. Using this uniform programming model the components of Riena and the business components of the enterprise application can be developed regardless of their target location. Components are later easily placed on client or server depending on the business requirements.

It will be very interesting to see what’s produced by this project that adds real value on top of RCP, Equinox/OSGi and a mediocre programmer’s brain.

I’m hopeful that it’s something that will make this really quite easy to achieve; unfortunately the realities of this rarely turnout to be quite so simple. Even ‘obvious’ optimisations, such as allowing ‘pass by reference’ semantics across the component boundary in the name of ‘performance’ tend to erode away at benefits such uniform programming models. Only time will tell… It’s pleasing to see a team having a go though.

[The riena project’s homepage can be found here. They also have a newsgroup at news://news.eclipse.org/eclipse.technology.riena.]

Wayne Beaton’s just written up a blog entry about Making Eclipse Plug-ins using JRuby or Groovy. I certainly agree with his opening statement :

Warning! if you have no experience building plug-ins, this post will probably mean very little to you.

… but if you do have an awareness it’s a good read.

It’s set me thinking about how I could use it but so far have failed to find a single example that would have helped me out. That said, it definitely falls into my cool category and is something I may well be looking to shoe-horn into a solution in the future.