RAP 1.5 M4 - New and Noteworthy

New Client/Server Protocol

With this milestone, all Ajax responses from a RAP server are now in plain JSON format. No JavaScript is included anymore. This makes the responses much more readable and eases debugging.

With this new protocol, it is now possible to develop alternative clients for RAP. The exact format is described in the RAP Protocol wiki page. Some details may still change until the release.

Target Platform Changes

Since RAP 1.5 will be available together with Eclipse Juno, the target platform is now based on Eclipse 4.2 instead of 3.8. However, the RAP implementation of the Eclipse Workbench remains to be based on 3.x. But there are a couple of important changes in the target platform.

• The servlet 3.0 API packages are now exported as version 2.6.0 to comply with the OSGi versioning rules (see bug 360245).
• The target platform includes Jetty 8 instead of Jetty 6. This is not just a change of the version number, also the package names have changed from org.mortbay.jetty to org.eclipse.jetty. Instead of two, Jetty now consists of seven bundles.
• The platform now includes a new OSGi console based on the Apache Felix Gogo project. Therefore, the basic target platform for RAP applications now contains three bundles (org.apache.felix.gogo.*) support it.

Please adapt your launch configurations to these changes as needed.