Article: Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform Use at CAS Software AG

Eclipse RAP (Rich Ajax Platform) in the real world is covered in this case study which looks at how CAS Software AG used RAP on a recent new product offering. Eclipse Equinox is also used by CAS and covered in the case study.  By making use of Eclipse RAP for the user interface, CAS was able to provide a desktop-like experience which quickly allows users to feel comfortable with the application. The user interface is designed with ergonomics in mind, making use of familiar widgets and behaviors such as drag and drop, all things users expect even from web applications.

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Eclipse RAP was utilized as the user interface in the presentation layer for CAS PIA for several reasons:

• Look and Feel - they were able to build very rich, ergonomic, theme-able interfaces that were difficult to distinguish from a thick client.
• Development Efficiency - the AJAX and JavaScript is baked into ready to use components which is hidden from the developer, allowing developers to code in Java with their familiar libraries and IDE.
• Flexibility - although RAP allows developers to stay away from writing JavaScript, HTML and CSS, it’s flexible enough so that custom components and styles could be added without any issue.
• Engineering Quality - Eclipse and their products employ best practice software design and practices, no exception with RAP.
• Single Codebase - RAP can be compiled into an AJAX or RCP application.

The presentation layer also consists of an OSGi runtime which provides modularity and reusability amongst other CAS products. CAS chose the Eclipse Equinox project as their implementation provider for OSGi and is defined as:

...an implementation of the OSGi R4 core framework specification, a set of bundles that implement various optional OSGi services and other infrastructure for running OSGi-based systems.

More generally, the goal of the Equinox project is to be a first class OSGi community and foster the vision of Eclipse as a landscape of bundles. As part of this, it is responsible for developing and delivering the OSGi framework implementation used for all of Eclipse.

The case study zooms in how they unit tested their Eclipse RAP components, created custom user interface components, issues they experienced during development, and their lessons learned.