Rich Ajax Platform(RAP) is a project from Eclipse aims to enable developers to build rich ajax and RIA by using eclipse development model, plugins and java-only apis. Innopract a Germany based company and an eclipse foundation member is the major contributor for this project.
The core of the RAP is a subset of SWT APIs and and some JFace. So over all the widgets available in the SWT and JFace are available to build the RIA. RAP is very similar to RCP, in the way that RCP runs on the desktop and RAP runs on the server. The RAP libraries intelligently renders the UI at the browser with the help of the JavaScript qooxdoo library. RAP lets many of the desktop based RCP applications to be run on the server with little or no changes in the code. Would it not be so cool to have a single code base and be able to have RCP and RIA? It’s very interesting to see the maturity of this project from incubator to 1.0 and all the new and note worthy features.
In the end it definitely competes with the GWT, AIR, Backbase, JackBe, Open Laszlo, etc… in the area of the AJAX Framework and Tools for building the applications. As APIs are based on Java, in this aspect it’s very close to GWT.
All the best to RAP !!!
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no bad…