E4 – A New Area For RCP/RIA Applications

i’m on the road to prepare my example for the e4 talk i’m delivering on the eclipse-developers-day in karlsruhe and i have to say that in my eyes e4 is going to open up a new world for eclipse-rcp-developers.

though rcp-applications written in 3.x might not look too bad no one can deny that the ui-design is coming from an ide background and compared to modern web-uis it looks boring (which is not a bad thing per se for business applications). the problem in 3.x is that it is very hard to impossible to change the l&f of your application.

e4 provides different multiple solutions to fix the l&f:

1. declarative-styleing through css
2. the possibility to define your own renderes to exchange widget a through widget b if css is not enough to theme your application

to demostrate what you can achieve when you combine the 1st and 2nd possibility i create a small screencast

where you see the famous e4-photo-application revamped

a second example application is our e4-contacts-demo created and maintained by kai tödter which shows advanced css-styles like radial gradients.

i use this application to show you another nice thing you can do with e4’s declarative styling support. you can adjust the styling of your application while it is running so that you can experiment with various font and color settings without shutting down your application.

if all this would not be enough you can run the unmodified code (please take this literally) from the example application above in your browser using the rap-framework.

if you are interested in e4 and what’s going on behind the scenes of the next major eclipse-release i hope to see you in karlsruhe on tuesday july 7th.