RAP of history

무언가 찾다가 버그질라에서 발견한 내용인데요.

2007년도에 RAP커미터중 한사람인 Jochen Krause 가 쓴 글인데요.
출발은 우리와 비슷한 프로젝트(?)로 출발 했지만, 나중에 결과물은 천지차이네요.
그 뚝심과 인내에 경의를 표하고 싶어 지네요.

원문은 (http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.technology.rap/msg01601.html)

Here you go with some RAP history:

RWT has indeed evolved from Innoopracts W4T technology, W4T stands for "www windowing toolkit". The first release of W4T was in December 2001, and it was our goal to make Java web development easier. This was not en vogue at that time, most of the Java crowd liked the complexity ;-)
We created a visual design tool for W4T as an Eclipse plugin - W4T Eclipse. W4T Eclipse became pretty popular with some groups as it simplified the creation of Java web apps quite a bit.
However, W4T was not a standard and we had an eye on JSF, which took almost forever to complete. We created a JSF compatible implementation that we dumped again, because we thought that the API of the components is almost impossible to understand for a Java (the language) developer. At least, we implemented a lifecycle management similar to that of JSF for W4T and moved ahead in 2005 to ajaxify the library. With the new Ajax capabilities we thought about enabling a workbench and plug-in based development approach for web applications. We successfully implemented proof of concepts for a "web workbench" as well as running osgi within a webcontainer in the summer of 2005. All of that was still based on the W4T api.

The RAP project was proposed in March 2006, and became an Eclipse project in late June 2006. It was still the plan to create a workbench implementation with W4T as widget toolkit. We realized pretty quickly that the Eclipse community preferred the SWT api for various valid reasons (not because W4T api was bad, but for code reuse, skill preservation, ...). So we began to re-implement the component layer with mostly SWT api and qooxdoo on the client side. Based on ongoing community feedback and after aligning with Steve Northover we decided in March 2007 to make RWT a subset of SWT.

That was the short version ;-). With respect to the development process of the Application framework the most notable thing in my eyes was the adoption of Eclipse APIs during the development. Even in the W4T days we had a JFace implementation (not fully API compatible). We decided at some point to innovate around an existing application framework that we think is very powerful (osgi, rcp), even if we don't agree with everything. If you want to get more info on how Eclipse as an application framework has evolved there are some great (old) slides by Jim de Rivieres. Erich Gamma and others. I don't have them handy but I think I could dig them out.

Cheers, Jochen