Innoopract, a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation and a provider of products and services for Eclipse introduced the Eclipse proposed project "Rich Ajax Platform"(RAP). RAP aims to provide an Eclipse-based development environment with the capabilities to create so-called "Rich Internet Applications." RAP enables programmers to develop desktop applications and web applications following the same programming model, resulting in negligible extra work.

RAP offers an architecture and usage similar to the Rich Client Platform (RCP) and includes a library of components built in the Java programming language and Ajax. Developers can use these components to develop dynamic user interfaces in a fraction of the time compared to traditional methods.

"With RAP we expand Eclipse with the features of Web 2.0," says Jochen Krause, CEO of Innoopract. In the pursuit of this goal, the German-based company will release the core of its W4T technology as open source into the RAP project and will support a supplier-independent development strategy for the RAP technology. "We are pleased to have this new proposal from Innoopract," said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of Eclipse Foundation. "It is great example of the technical innovation that is occurring in the Eclipse community."

Web-based business applications often fall short of the expectations. With web applications, the inclusion of a multitude of different technologies leads to substantially higher development and administration costs when compared to client-server applications. Furthermore, the user experience of web applications is still a big step behind the established standards in desktop applications.

Desktop applications have benefited from some groundbreaking concepts in the last several years, most notably the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). RCP has convincingly addressed the issue of operating system independence and offers sophisticated and flexible application architecture as a basis for robust desktop applications.

Web applications are also becoming faster and more user-friendly with Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Ajax combines several existing technologies to provide a more dynamic interactive Web UI by selectively downloading content and sparing the need to entirely reload mostly unchanged pages. Yet with all this additional technology being added to Web applications, without the right tools, Ajax further increases the complexity of web applications.