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Eclipse Wraps RAP 1.0


Rich AJAX Platform offers server-side Java to AJAX

By Alex Handy
October 15, 2007 — 
The Eclipse Foundation has completed work on its first piece of middleware. The Rich AJAX Platform (RAP) version 1.0, released today, gives Java developers a new way to speak AJAX. RAP 1.0 offers a server-side solution for Java application deployment into AJAX compatible clients.

Jochen Krause, developer at Innoopract and the project lead on RAP, explained that the platform is based on a commercial tool he helped to build back in 2001. The World Wide Web Windowing Toolkit eventually morphed into RAP by July 2006, when Krause first proposed the project to the Eclipse Foundation.

But it’s new territory for the foundation. As a server-side solution for AJAX deployment, RAP is not an IDE plug-in; unlike the rest of the Eclipse Foundation’s projects, RAP is strictly middleware. It runs on a Java application server, and dynamically translates Java Web applications into AJAX so that screens can be passed to the browser without the need for plug-ins on the user’s end.

RAP is built on Equinox, the Eclipse implementation of OSGi. As such, said Krause, it makes for a more componentized platform. “Someone can write an application, and someone else can contribute to the UI, or you can reuse a component that’s dealing with business logic, [and use it] on the desktop and on the server,” said Krause.

The biggest boon for developers looking at building Java-based Web applications, said Krause, is that they can take Eclipse RCP applications, or any Java application for that matter, and quickly push a browser-friendly version to users without major changes to the code. Krause estimated that roughly 10 percent of the code in an Eclipse RCP application would need to be changed before it’s ready for a RAP deployment.

Krause explained that when he began on the project, he and his collaborators didn’t expect to be able to achieve this high a level of code reuse between desktop and Web applications. Nevertheless, they managed to do it, so for the future, the team’s goal is to hit 100 percent reusability. But Krause admitted that the team is not certain this can be done. “We still think a couple of things are not possible. But we’ll see if they really are. From the community, the biggest request is for graphical editors. If you think about SOA and business process stuff, people would love to just model that in a browser, and execute it on the same server you model it on,” said Krause. They hope to enable this sort of application modeling with their next release.


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