Spring RCP - Roadmap?

[dominiksh]

Hi everybody,

I have already successfully used Spring RCP for a project. I am currently in the planning period for my next project and maybe I will use Spring RCP again.

But when looking at http://spring-rich-c.sourceforge.net/, the latest news item is more than half a year old. So is the project still alive? And will there be a new release sometimes in the nearer future?

Thanks,

[Steam]

Yes, dominiksh

My opinion is absolutely the same. Guys are trying to position the project as part of “Spring”, but doesn’t spent time to provide just a little documentation. This is not industrial development, this is an amateur playing only… Unfortunately. It doesn’t matter the men are talented or no… They don’t have time to provide their idea and plans. They created not so bad rich framework (by using ‘Spring’ as umbrella), and seems forgot about it…

[gulcher]

This is not true, if you check out the SVN trunk, you would see that there is still activity going on. There have been a lot of changes from release 0.2.1 to the snapshot 0.3.0

As of documentation, there are a lot of tutorials available and don't forget this forum, where you can discuss/ask anything of other developers, who are already using Spring RCP.

I am sure that when a final release 1.0 will come out, there will be taken some action to write documentation. Maybe it is a good ideau that YOU start writing some code or documentation yourself, since you are part of the community using Spring RCP??

Theo.

[dominiksh]

Hi Theo,

your post tells me the project is still alive and making progress. So I will have to check out the project from SVN to get the newest state.

But that does not answer my question: Does the project have something like a roadmap? Will there be any stable releases in the nearer future? It is not really professionall to rely on development snapshots while using a product for a serious project, but I do not see an alternative if there will not be a new stable release.

[gulcher]

Dominik,

I don't think there is a road map for Spring RCP...

Theo

[Steam]

Dominik,

I don't think there is a road map for Spring RCP...

Theo

In other words, you suppose the RCP movement is absolutely chaotic and rambling? M-m-m… Theoretically, it's roadmap too. But, seems, not so good roadmap.

[dominiksh]

Does no one of the developers want to say something on this topic?

[awacs]

I spend a lot of time in the last three month writing my thesis about spring rich and eclipse rcp. I also developed applications using both frameworks. As far as I can tell the development of spring rich is still active. There are by far not as many developers involved as in the eclipse rcp (around 120 to 13). But there are automated nightly builds (see [1]) and at least some commits to the repository (see [2]).

The framework core is also very usable by now (0.3.0-SNAPSHOT). The abstractions are very good (especially the abstractions used in the forms (field based editors)). The code for displaying a labeled text field which is bound to a domain object is around one line. Also more higher concepts like master/detail tables are very easy to implement.

I would suggest at least evaluating the spring rich client framework before ruling it out on the basis of missing news or updates on the project homepage.

rgds/awacs

[1] http://build.springframework.org:8085/bamboo/browse/RCP
[2] http://sourceforge.net/project/stats...ich-c&type=svn

[Steam]

The framework core is also very usable by now (0.3.0-SNAPSHOT). The abstractions are very good (especially the abstractions used in the forms (field based editors))...

Possible, the abstractions are very good, but it is useless if nobody knows about it. Any software product can achieve complexity when one page of document is much more useful then a lot of lines of sources.

This time RCH enough complex library and it looks like not so many people feel the power to investigate it without some documents. What the developer should do with so beautiful abstractions? Abstraction is not a girl to admire. They want to use it for development without spending a lot of time for source investigation.

[awacs]

Dear Steam, I can understand your concerns regarding documentation. But, there is some documentation available. First of all there is the confluence [1] which holds a lot of design documents which are still valid. And there is the API doc [2]. The only thing which I was missing in the first place was some sort of "getting started" documents. In [3] Chris Parsons walked through the petstore application, which answered most beginners questions (at least for me). If you are willing to search for the documentation you'll find it.

Nevertheless I agree that for a production type library the overall documentation should be more up to date and easier to find. But for a library which is still in "alpha/beta" stage I guess you get a pretty functional and stable library which is not as bloated as other rich client libraries.

[1] http://opensource.atlassian.com/conf...splay/RCP/Home
[2] http://spring-rich-c.sourceforge.net...w-summary.html
[3] http://pa.rsons.org/node/6