Eclipse RAP - any opinions?
I've been taking a look at eclipse RAP http://www.eclipse.org/rap/ and wondering ... is it a viable alternative to Echo?
I always though it would be nice to be able to swap my echo2 jars (with a minimal tweaking of the application) and have a Swing or SWT based app as a Desktop app. Well this is what RAP promises - you build you App in SWT and you can run it over the web or as a desktop. I took a look at the JS toolkit they are using (http://qooxdoo.org/) and it makes a might fine impression - especially the table stuff and and all the widgets they support - supposedly 80% of SWT is covered in RAP - although I haven't found which 80% exactly. The example applications are pretty impressive as well and just like in Echo you don't need to mess around with JS, CSS, HTML, forms, parameters etc - pure JAVA
I'm a big fan of Echo2 and I want to soon start using Echo3 for new applications and port of the old ones. However, if RAP really does what it says on the box then it's going to be hard to ignore. Granted there is concern about performance, scalability and a very steep learning curve associated with the Eclipse programming model. However, it may be worth the investment.
I'd be interested in hearing other peoples thoughts on this.
Edge
I'm sure that approach has
I'm sure that approach has its applications. That said, Echo didn't build on a desktop-based UI toolkit (e.g. Swing or SWT) for a number of reasons though. Most notable is the memory footprint issue, i.e., Swing/SWT were not designed to massive numbers of instances to operate on a single machine. Additionally these desktop toolkits were not designed for the needs of a remote view, i.e., to minimize traffic between the rendered UI and application code.
In my brief look at it, the overall the approach appears very similar to that of Echo3. You have Qooxdoo playing the role of the client-side Echo3 framework, and SWT is in the role of the Echo3 server-side component framework (nextapp.echo.app.*), and Eclipse RAP is serving as an SWT back end (instead of the SWT Windows/Carbon/GTK backend), in the same role as Echo's Web Application Container (nextapp.echo.webcontainer.*).
Quite easy to build another client for remote echo apps
It's perfectly straight forward to build alternative client front-ends for echo3 remote apps.
I am planning to perhaps do a SWT one. I hate the SWT API, but I love the quality of the resultant UIs when compared to Swing.
Time is very tricky at the moment, so I haven't got far with it. Just about half-way through a simple port of the javascript client-side engine to java.