RAP 1.4 M7 - New and Noteworthy

The internals of RWT have been changed so that it is now possible to run more than one instances of RWT in the same Java Virtual Machine.
Applications that wish to leverage this should no longer use static fields to store instances with application scope. Instead they should make use of the new IApplicationStore.
Note: for applications using the workbench, these changes don't make a difference as multiple workbench applications cannot be run in parallel in a single virtual machine.

We decided to entirely remove support for GZIP-compressing response content (bug 342242). Initially, RAP always compressed response content. As it turned out that this interfered with Tomcat and chunked transfer encoding (bug 259977), compression was made configurable to transition from using RAP's compression to using the servlet engines compression feature.
If you wish to use content compression, please make sure that the servlet container that you deploy the RAP application into, is configured accordingly. Learn here how to enable content compression for Jetty and Tomcat.

RAP-Theming now supports shadows on the following widgets:

• Shell
• Menu
• Widget-ToolTip
• ToolTip
• Combo-List
• CCombo-List

Shadows can have configurable horizontal offset, vertical offset, blur-radius and color. In Internet Explorer the blur-effect might look slightly different due to technical limitations. Shadow also supports transparency using the rgba notation for color.

RAP now uses CSS3 to render rounded borders, gradients and shadows in Google Chrome, Safari (including iPad/iPhone) and Firefox 4. Other browser still use vector graphics. In Internet Explorer 9 CSS3 might be supported in the future.

The following widgets now support their native drag-and-drop behavior on iOS:

• ScrollBar
• Shell
• Sash
• Scale
• Slider
• TableColumn
• TreeColumn

This is not to be confused with support for the SWT Drag and Drop API, which is currently not enabled on iOS-devices.
It is recommended to increase the size for the draggable elements to make them easier to hit with a finger. Since this can be done using only theming, its possible to target mobile and desktop clients with the same application, but different themes.

We introduced a simple and single-sourcing capable way of adding key bindings to plain RWT applications. In order to instruct the client to issue key events for certain key sequences, a list of active key sequences must be attached to the display using Display#setData() with the new constant RWT.ACTIVE_KEYS.
The resulting key events can then be handled, just like in SWT, by adding a global key event listener to the display using Display.addFilter(). For details, please refer to the JavaDoc of RWT.ACTIVE_KEYS.

When you chose one of the RAP templates in the New Plug-in Project wizard, the tooling will ensure that a RAP target platform is activated. If not, a dialog will appear that offers to install and activate a RAP target.

We re-organized the Main tab of the RAP launcher and added some new features:

You can now configure the location of the Instance Area in the launcher's Main tab. The instance area is the OSGi data location, where all bundles of the running application can store their state information. This includes resources that are used by the RAP server, such as images, but also the setting store. By selecting the option Clear the instance area before launching, you can ensure that all these resources are cleared when you re-start a RAP application.

You can now specify a Context Path in the launcher. The context path is an optional additional path segment that enables you to launch your application with a URL similar to your real deployment environment. As an example, when you deploy an application named myapp on tomcat, it will usually be accessible under an URL like http://server:port/myapp/myservletname, where myapp is the webapp, and myservletname is the servlet name you choose in the branding.

Moreover, the launcher will now display a preview of the URL that your application will be accessible at.

The RAP tooling has grown by yet another launch configuration. With the RWT Application Launcher you can run RWT applications with just one shortcut. For those that might not have heard of RWT yet, think of it as SWT/Web. RWT is RAP without the workbench and OSGi, it plays the same role in RAP as SWT does for the Eclipse Platform/RCP.
To run an RWT application, select a class (e.g. in the editor or package explorer) that implements IEntryPoint and hit Alt+Shift+X 3 (please feel free to file a bug if you find a more suitable shortcut that is not yet taken by another launch configuration). You can also launch an RWT application by selecting a project instead of a class file. You will be prompted to select a class from those classes that define an entry point.
Besides launching RWT applications, it can also be used to run arbitrary web applications, provided that there is a deployment descriptor (web.xml).