There is a very intriguing ‘part 1’ tutorial about the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) over at Developerworks.

This article was written in part by Chris Aniszczyk, who most people who deal with Eclipse will recognize as a very strong force in the Eclipse community.

While I had read and seen demos of RAP before, I felt this article did the best yet at capturing how seamless the move to RAP can be from a coding perspective. I like this snippet, that shows the differences between an RCP window and an RAP window:

// ****** RCP ****** import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Point; import org.eclipse.ui.application.ActionBarAdvisor; import org.eclipse.ui.application.IActionBarConfigurer; import org.eclipse.ui.application.IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer; import org.eclipse.ui.application.WorkbenchWindowAdvisor;

public class ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor extends WorkbenchWindowAdvisor {

public ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor(IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer) {
    super(configurer);
}

public ActionBarAdvisor createActionBarAdvisor(IActionBarConfigurer configurer) {
    return new ApplicationActionBarAdvisor(configurer);
}

public void preWindowOpen() {
    IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer = getWindowConfigurer();
    configurer.setInitialSize(new Point(400, 300));
    configurer.setShowCoolBar(false);
    configurer.setShowStatusLine(false);
    configurer.setTitle("Hello RCP");
}

}

// ****** vs RAP ******

import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Point; import org.eclipse.ui.application.ActionBarAdvisor; import org.eclipse.ui.application.IActionBarConfigurer; import org.eclipse.ui.application.IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer; import org.eclipse.ui.application.WorkbenchWindowAdvisor;

public class ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor extends WorkbenchWindowAdvisor {

public ApplicationWorkbenchWindowAdvisor(IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer) {
    super(configurer);
}

public ActionBarAdvisor createActionBarAdvisor(IActionBarConfigurer configurer) {
    return new ApplicationActionBarAdvisor(configurer);
}

public void preWindowOpen() {
    IWorkbenchWindowConfigurer configurer = getWindowConfigurer();
    configurer.setInitialSize(new Point(400, 300));
    configurer.setShowCoolBar(false);
    configurer.setShowStatusLine(false);
    configurer.setTitle("Hello RAP");
}

}

In fact, the only difference in these two is the title line, and that’s just because they used a string literal.

Overall, I find that to be pretty alluring.