Yet another improvement in Eclipse Galileo

As you might know since end of June new simultaneous Eclipse release Galileo was released. There are quite a number of resources dedicated to new features that are available in this release, so for example it should be a first Eclipse release where for example Eclipse SOA Runtime (aka. Swordfish) would be included… however this entry is not about Swordfish (I will write this one soon :) ). This one is about another, rather small improvement that might have a big influence for web applications that should be a good Eclipse citizens as well as working in standalone browser.

If you are reading this blog you might already seen another entry where I was thinking about such applications – what kind of problems would we have to integrate it, how to enable interaction between browser’s JavaScript runtime and Eclipse runtime. It wasn’t easy, mostly because java.swt.Browser have rather simplistic interface – one can open browser, register for location change evens and that’s mostly it. Browser in pre-Galileo releases remain a black-box, more to say a native blackbox. But not for a long :)

Since Galileo SWT Browser widget have an improved JavaScript-Java bridge that allow to call pre-defined functions from JavaScript as well as call JavaScript from Java within the specified Browser instance. Check the JavaDoc for BrowserFunction and an example on how to call Java from JavaScript. This is really cool, just a very small improvement enable the whole new area of applications to be developed on top of it, and what is also very important platform is available right now.

Now we only need a framework that will solve following problems:

• Provide a simple and flexible Eclipse API integration layer, for triggering file operations, or import/export wizards.
• Solve the delivery problem on how to deliver complex and modular JavaScript applications in a way that would be also supported by usual WebContainers
• Maintain a good balance between flexibility of In-Eclipse and In-Browser environments
• In-Eclipse offline support and may be Google-Gears integration when Eclipse is not available

So, allot of new opportunities, and actually it might be a good way to migrate applications step-by-step from fat-client/Eclipse-based applications to more “cloud-friendly” web applications..