Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Web-enabled Draw2D in RAP?

My colleagues from the RAP Team have created proof-of-concept implementation of a web-enabled Draw2D port. This could eventually allow you to port existing graphical applications based on the GEF/Draw2D frameworks to the web.



Click here to watch the video.


So will this be available as part of Eclipse RAP soon?

No, this work was intended as a feasibility study. At this point we are looking for parties that are interested in using and productizing this technology.

Regards,
Elias.

6 comments:

Ian Bull said...

I work on the Zest component of GEF, a visualization toolkit based on Draw2D. Essentially Zest is JFace for Graphs. I would be very interested in this.

What are you using to render the graph? The canvas tag or just move-able DIV layers?

Asim said...

Is perhaps the clue in the title bar?

flexdraw2d

Elias Volanakis said...

Hi Ian,

we use combination of Java and Flex, similar to what we do with RWT.

As you know RWT provides a web-enabled API-compatible implementation of SWT.

The technology in the video provides a web-enabled implementation of Draw2D while preserving the original Java APIs. My colleagues tell me that they are able run Draw2D snippets without modifications.

The layouting and UI state are kept on the server. The browser receives a flex-based component which takes care of passing user-activity to the server and rendering the UI updates it receives in response.

Regards,
Elias.

Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

very cool!

btw, I love the hat Elias ;)

Martin Harrigan said...

Great idea - the video looks very promising - will this ever make it to the eclipse repositories or is it solely for the commerical world?

Elias Volanakis said...

Hi Martin,

thanks for your interest.

This has previously been discussed in this thread:

http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/rap-dev/msg00248.html

Feel free to post follow-up questions on the rap-dev mailing list:

https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/rap-dev

Kind regards,
Elias.