I have been trying to work with
RAP. The experiment we did for my work with this infrastructure is somewhat unsuccessful. It has been a pain in the ass at many points.
I will write here a summary of my problems with this infrastructure:
- RAP platform configuration
- Layout difficulties
- Deployment difficulties
- lost sessions
RAP platform configuration
One problem with RAP, which may be corrected later on, is that the SWT and RWT cannot be there
both at the same time. This means that to use RAP you must configure the eclipse IDE to work with
RAP instead of SWT. This proved to be tricky once or twice, especially when switching versions.
RAP is no real solutions where you can just get the libraries and just start programming, and this is in my opinion one of the main drawback.
Layout difficulties
Maybe I am not much of a GUI person, and maybe I do not understand the GUI documentation. But
I had a very hard time building the interface. I had to try many things. in many cases, I had to
use the same tricks over and over not really understanding what the reasons for the failed layout were. This proved to be very annoying, especially when you think this should be simple and basic.
Note that I am not sure this is a RAP problem. But rather an eclipse SWT problem.
Deployment difficulties
At some points I tried to use the RAP deployment mechanism. But when I tried to create the
WAR files, the RAP application could not be loaded. The problem is that the use of the embedded
equinox server did not give much information about which happened. This may be a question of know how and knowledge of the right tools to use. But it took me a long time to find solutions or reasons for the errors. In many cases, I still do not know why it did not work. This makes the deployment process unsecure and very time consuming.
lost sessions
We developed a tool based on RAP for a client. Apart from the hibernate problems I had, RAP was the main difficulty in the project. The last one, and the most annoying one, is that the RAP installation did not work correctly under Apache. It seemed that it would always loose its sessions. This made it very annoying and in particular the client could not see anything appear on its site.
No RAP bashing, just a RAP rant
Though I had lots of difficulties with RAP. I would not say it sucks. But anyone using this as basis for some tool must be aware of the difficulties behind it.
