We are announcing the 1.0 release of Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) on Monday. I find the press releases I’ve been writing lately have been kind of boring. I also found this press release recently announced on O’Reilly Radar very refreshing. Therefore, I decided to write an alternative press release for RAP 1.0. The ‘real one’ is here but I kind of like this one better. What do you think?
PRESS RELEASE
Does the World Really Need Another Ajax Toolkit?
Well Eclipse is releasing another one called Eclipse RAP 1.0.
OTTAWA – October 15, 2007 – The Eclipse Foundation today announced the release of Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) 1.0, yet another Ajax toolkit. You might think, don’t we have too many Ajax toolkits already? We probably do but we think RAP 1.0 is pretty interesting and will help people who want to build Ajax applications using Eclipse.
The neat thing about RAP is that you write Ajax applications in Java and use the Eclipse component model based on OSGi. Think of it something like GWT but using Eclipse plugins. This means you can now architect your Ajax applications as extensible components. For large companies this is a big deal since they typically like to create architectures that help them re-use code in different applications.
The Eclipse community is pretty excited about RAP. During the creation review, lots of people vote +1, even before the review. Typically, it is difficult for us to get people to vote at all. There are also people that have already deployed applications based on RAP. For instance, this company in Spain has done an HR recruiting system with RAP. We have included a screenshot to show what they have done in RAP.
We also know of a really big company using RAP, trust us, but their marketing guys won’t let us talk about them. The thing these developers really like about RAP is the ability to build and deploy applications as RIA and RCP applications from a single code base. It is still not 100% perfect but the idea of using RAP to write an application once and then deciding to deploy it as a browser based RIA or desktop RCP application sounds pretty exciting to us.
If you want you to know more about the features, checkout the New and Noteworthy, or better yet download RAP and give it a try. Let us know what you think and if you like it, make sure you tell your friends.
