EclipseZone - Running Eclipse on the Server

The Rich Engineering Heritage Behind Dependency Injection

Andrew McVeigh takes us on a tour of the rich heritage behind dependency injection, what it represents, and tells us why its here to stay.

Java, the OLPC, and community responsibility

The "One Laptop Per Child" project has a great device ready to ship, but there's no Java on there. Let's think about working together to put Java on OLPC!

Replies: 9 - Pages: 1

Reply 1. At 9:47 PM on Jan 19, 2006, Lokesh Shah wrote:: Re: Running Eclipse on the Server - From RCP to RSP
I can see building non-SWT desktop application (read swing) using this.

~Lokesh; --
Lokesh Shah
JBlogEditor
JHelpBuilder
Reply 2. At 10:31 PM on Jan 19, 2006, Chris Aniszczyk wrote:: Re: Running Eclipse on the Server - From RCP to RSP
Where's the demo?
Reply 3. At 10:39 PM on Jan 19, 2006, Wolfgang Gehner wrote:: The full article with the demo is here:
http://www.infonoia.com/en/content.jsp?d=inf.05.07
Reply 4. At 4:08 AM on Jan 20, 2006, Alex Blewitt wrote:: Re: Running Eclipse on the Server - From RCP to RSP
You can do that already. Pretty much all of the plugins have non-UI plugins on which the UI ones depend, and given that you'd have to write Swing-specific versions of those plugins anyway, this technology isn't going to help that much.

Not only that, it's already been done.

http://www.swingui.com/

Alex.

PS What equinox does is further divorce the filing system specific bits like IResource and allows a plugin not to have any dependencies on the filing system.
Reply 5. At 4:12 AM on Jan 20, 2006, Dominik Maehl wrote:: Re: Running Eclipse on the Server - From RCP to RSP
Hi,

I'm a Java developer from Germany. We've developed a complete OSGI/Eclipse Rich Server app for inhouse use. It was a steep learning curve because we never did anything serious with Eclipse before. But from my point of view it has really paid off. Modularization through plug-ins has/is helping a lot.

I see "RSP" as quite a big thing and if the possibility opens up I will use it again.
Reply 6. At 4:18 AM on Jan 20, 2006, Wolfgang Gehner wrote:: Re: Running Eclipse on the Server - From RCP to RSP
Inhouse OSGI-server solution...

Would you consider open-sourcing it?

With some luck, the community might move it further.
Reply 7. At 4:05 AM on Feb 20, 2006, Mikkel R. Jakobsen wrote:: Re: Running Eclipse on the Server - From RCP to RSP
Indeed this is interesting. Though most of the discussion appears to be focused on stand alone server-side applications (web apps), I think perhaps an Eclipse/OSGi-framework is even better suited for applications based on a client-server architecture that uses remoting, say with web services, than to pure web applications. (I think this is what Wolfgang meant by "dual apps"?)

I recently started designing an extensible client-server architecture with an RCP-based client and the server running in a servlet container (to be described in more details on http://mrj.woo.dk/squareroot). A key driver in the design is that the platform is extensible by allowing components to be easily added, both on the client and the server. While leveraging the Eclipse framework to this end on the client side, my approach on the server side requires the administrator to configure the application in the web.xml deployment descriptor file. I think my framework is rudimentary, but flexible and quite easy to set up, mostly thanks to the Spring Framework. However, the thought of a plugin-based framework where plugins can be registered on both the client and the server appeals to me.

The most important benefit I can see of an Eclipse-framework on the server, is the control of dependencies between plugins, but I also think that the plugin-infrastructure can be exploited for remoting aspects (defining and exposing service API). I would be interested in collaborating on this.
Reply 8. At 4:52 AM on Feb 20, 2006, Wolfgang Gehner wrote:: Rich Server 2-part tutorial available
There is now a technical walkthrough available:

http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t64085.html
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t64096.html

Mikkel, would you be interested in writing a remoting sample (where a client-side plug-in draws on a remote resource, from such as, but not limited to, its server-side sibling)? Pre-OSGi, I have successfully used Hessian for this http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/protocols/hessian.xtp

I could imagine a generic plug-in that uses Hessian (over OSGI http service) to transport Java objects. But there may be many other possibilities.
Reply 9. At 8:00 AM on Feb 20, 2006, Mikkel R. Jakobsen wrote:: Re: Rich Server 2-part tutorial available
I haven't tried the OSGi http service yet, so I don't know how to go about integrating remoting with the equinox server framework. It would take me some time to set this up, I think.

With regard to accessing remote services from client-side plugins, I intend to write up an overview of the approach I've committed to for the extensible architecture of my current project. Perhaps that can serve as inspiration for us to think remoting in the OSGi http service framework. In any case, I must have a look at the rsp demo code that you have submitted on sourceforge. The only thing that scares me in your walkthrough are the cumbersome build procedures in the development environment, but maybe it's not so bad and maybe there are ways of getting around them with a joint effort.