Ian Skerret put his finger on a slew of new Eclipse proposals have been submitted and they are all from the server family of technologies. Wolgang Gehner is responsible for this new push into the server direction with the OSGI framework and has actually written a 2-part article for EclipseZone that began a lot of this work. You can find Part 1 here , and Part 2 here . In addition to these articles Wolfgang put together another demo on Infonoia's site you can check out here . Overall it's an interesting move to make with what, at one point, a platform we all though was simply a client side application framework. The proposals in question are as follows:

Rich Server Platform – User Interface Framework (RSP-UI)
Summary:

1. What: UI framework to compose integrated server-side applications Eclipse/OSGi-style, thereby enhancing developer productivity 2. Allow sets of rendering technologies to be combined for versatile applications 3. Augment the Eclipse community by bridging client- and server-side assets

Highlights:

• RCP-Like components for server use
• Support for JSP/JSTL, Apache Struts, Wicket, JSF/Facelets and other applicable widget libraries, LZX/Laszlo and PHP
• Relationships with other Eclipse Projects: ATF, Corona, ECF, PHP-IDE, OHF (Healthcare), RAP
• Very large initial contributions list and developers. Infonoia will be provided Struts support, OPS4J with Wicket support, TXE Systems with the OSGI/Web bridge and Vetta Technologies with web workbench and scriptling language integration

Enterprise Component Framework
Summary:

The Enterprise Component Framework's goal is to create a comprehensive component model for enterprise application development. The component model will provide a great deal of flexibility for building enterprise applications from components. In addition, applications would benefit from the component approach by acquiring such feature as adaptability e.g. ability to react on changes in environment at runtime. Finally, the project will create the ability to easily create enterprise application from existing components for development teams and users.

Highlights:

• Component model based on OSGI platform
• Support for other components like JavaBeans and persistence frameworks
• Conversion of existing artifacts to enterprise artifacts (a la web services?)
• Use of descriptors and/or annotations to markup resources
• Initially an Exadel effort with initial code contribution coming from their Eclipse-based Components Framework

Rich AJAX Platform (RAP)
Summary:

The RAP project aims to enable developers to build rich, AJAX-enabled Web applications by using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins and a Java-only API.

Highlights:

• Innoopract's W4T AJAX Component Library (Demo here: http://rap.innoopract.com/webworkbench/W4TDelegate)
• This framework will essentially be Web/AJAX-Enabled versions of the RCP that can be used to build web applications
• Aggressive release plan with usable code this year and final release early next year

It's amazing to see how fast the server market using Eclipse technology blew up. I was fortunate enough to meet with the Innoopract team at EclipseCon and talk to them about their W4T toolkit and I have to say, it is *very* impressive. You can see from the demo link above yourself.