RAP 1.3 M3 - New and Noteworthy

Here are some of the more noteworthy things that are available in the milestone build M3 (November 13th, 2009) which is now available for download.

This list shows all bugs that were fixed during this milestone.

RWT

New API added Here is a list of API methods added in this milestone:
  • Display#addListener() and Display#removeListener() which allow to register for SWT.Close and SWT.Dispose events.
  • Display#disposeExec()
  • Display#close()
  • Shell() default constructor
  • SelectionEvent#stateMask, that represents the state of the keyboard modifier keys at the time the event was generated
  • Improved Display#getDefault() - now creates a display if executed from the user-interface thread. (see bug 293809 for details)
Non-shared SWT Resources Constructors for the following resources were implemented
  • Cursor
  • Color
  • Font
  • Image
The factory methods (Graphics#get*) are still the recommended way for dealing with resources in RWT. If single-sourcing is desired and the extra memory is justifible, using resource-constructors might be considered.
With this change, also dispose() and isDisposed() were introduced. Even though these methods exist for all resources (shared and non-shared) it is considered an error to disposed of factory-created (shared) resources and an IllegalStateException is thrown in this case.
Browser History New API has been added to interact with the browser's history stack. The IBrowserHistory implementation can be obtained via RWT.getBrowserHistory(). To create a new history entry, you can use its createEntry() method. In order to receive notification of user-directed changes to the current history entry, use addBrowserHistoryListener().

To see the browser history support in action, see the RAP Examples
Customizable focus indicator We implemented a themeable focus indicator for buttons. This allows to show the focus rectangle inside the buttons.

Look & Feel

Theming and new designs We extended the theming for a couple of widgets (such as CTabFolder, CLabel, Combo, Spinner and DateTime) and improved the new "fancy" design e.g. the support for standalone views was added.

A great deal of the bugs and enhancement requests fixed in this milestone are related to design and theming.

Tooling

Session Timeout Option The RAP Application Launcher now has an option to specify the session timeout in Seconds. This can come in handy if you whish to test session shutdown scenarios and saves you from remembering the lengthy org.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.context.sessioninactiveinterval VM argument.

The above features are just the ones that are new since the last milestone build. Summaries for earlier builds: