Hot Deploy & F5/Refresh-Driven Web Application Development Are Ancient Compared to Eclipse RAP!

Most web applications developer would be very familiar with F5/Refresh-Driven development. You know, make a little change and press F5 in the web browser and you can view the updated page. This was the good old PHP days.

Java EE web application developers used to not that lucky. While some changes like JSP pages, JSF facelets, etc. take effect immediately (and thus, "refresh-driven"), in some cases they have to "redeploy". This usually means developer changes a Java class backing bean or an "important" file like web.xml. Redeploy means undeploying the web app from the Java EE container or application server, then redeploying the web app or WAR again. IDEs like the excellent Eclipse IDE Indigo (yay!) automate this but a redeploy can take anything between a few seconds to... minutes! I think typical web apps would deploy in about 20-30 seconds so that is painful.

JRebel from ZeroTurnaround (which just won the Most Innovative Java Technology in JAX Innovation Awards 2011, congratulations guys!) really helps here, by allowing most common changes to not cause a full redeploy, but just... hot deploy! It's like JSP/JSF but for the rest of Java app, Spring beans, etc. JRebel is a commercial plug-in but is definitely worth it.

But I'd argue Eclipse RAP should won the Most Innovative Java Technology title... Here's why!

(Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform/RAP is framework to develop AJAX-powered web applications easily based on Eclipse RCP programming model, see Eclipse Rich Client Platform (2nd Edition) for more information.)

I've just noticed something today. I know I should've noticed this long ago, but when you launch an Eclipse RAP rich internet application from Eclipse IDE using Debug (F11 key), ALL your code changes take effect immediately! No exceptions!

No need to even refresh the web browser!

Change the code for a menu item or a view or an action, save the .java file, go to the browser and click it... your new code is there!

"No refresh? But how can it be!"

Part of the magic is due to OSGi Dynamic Module System, that is brilliantly integrated as part of the Eclipse platform itself.

So when you save a Java file, Eclipse IDE will compile your class (and only your class, due to incremental builder feature, so it's very fast!), then update the OSGi bundle or Eclipse plug-in in the Eclipse RAP application. And only your bundle/plug-in is updated/refreshed in the application, so again, even if it's a different process it's also very fast. The whole process typically takes less than a second on a typical developer workstation, even on moderately complex apps! Most of the time the process is already done before you have a chance to hit Alt+Tab. ;-)

The other part of the magic is even though Eclipse RAP application comes with full AJAX features by default (it's not an option, it's actually a requirement), most of the business logic is server-side Java. So even if the most of the render JavaScript/HTML presentation layer in the web browser, when you perform an action for example by clicking a menu item, this will trigger a server request...

Which means your updated code! Yay! :)

Also important feature of Eclipse RAP is that for background/long-running jobs or "server push" operations, Eclipse RAP supports several approaches: Eclipse Jobs API or session-long UICallback.

This is pretty much automatic if you're already an Eclipse RCP programmer utilizing Jobs API. There's no need to do workarounds and hacks like traditional AJAX web development or learn yet another new API (and programming model) just for server push.

To learn more about Eclipse platform programming, I highly recommend Eclipse Rich Client Platform (vogella series) by Lars Vogel. It's really good for learning Eclipse RCP/RAP development, most of the things that apply to RCP also applies to RAP. In fact, you can single-source an application to two target platforms (RCP for desktop, RAP for web) simultaneously. :-)