Hi All,
Does anyone have any experience using or investigating the
new Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform – RAP (http://www.eclipse.org/rap/)? This seems
to be a new offering from the Eclipse community that extends the Eclipse component/plugin
architecture & the Rich Client Platform [RCP] client development model to “web”
applications. It is a server centric application – the J2EE web container
holds UI & context state for every user by instantiating & maintaining
the Eclipse plugins and user-specific objects as long as the user’s web
session is active. Does anyone have experience exploring this?
At first it seems an exciting development model with code-reuse
& skill-reuse opportunities (especially, if you want to port an existing
RCP application to the web), but there could be scalability & performance
issues because of runtime model and the dependency on server-side processing.
For example, table sorting will need to happen on the server as the client is a
pure visual element tree with almost no processing/logic, except what is
required for immediate UI display – so every user gesture would most
likely need server trip for getting updates and/or syncing the client-server state.
Seems to go in the opposite direction of RIAs/GWT etc., that want to bring more
and more power on the client side.
What do you guys think? Is it a viable model, even for “enterprise”
applications?
Thanks,
Sarang Kulkarni