Eclipse RCP/RAP with Spring DM, Spring Data JPA and Remoting [step0]

XDocReport project provides a modular Eclipse RCP/RAP XDocReport application where you can develop your own module with Eclipse Plugin to manage your domain with CRUD Form and generates some reporting. The online RAP demo provides for instance a Resume module to manage resume (create/update/search resume and generate report resume):

This application is based on :

• Eclipse RCP to provide Fat Rich Client.
• Eclipse RAP to provide the same application in WEB mode
• Eclipse Gemini Blueprint to use Spring on OSGi context. This project is the donation of the Spring DM project to Eclipse
• Spring Data JPA is used to implement our DAO with JPA. This Spring project is very impressive because you need not code your JPA Query. You must just follow some convention name with your methode DAO interface and that’s all! Spring Data JPA implements (at runtime) for you the JPA DAO.
• Eclipselink used as JPA Implementation.

You can find sources from this Eclipse RCP/RAP application on Git.

Our 2 next goals is :

• manage remoting to provide too Client (RCP Client) and Server (Services on server side) architecture. To do that we have several solutions like :
  • CXF DOSGi (with REST).
  • ECF (with REST).
  • Spring Remoting (with Spring’s HTTP invoker).
• use Eclipse E4 instead of Eclipse RCP as soon as Eclipse RAP will support Eclipse E4.

We spent much time to study how to manage those technologies together but today we like this architecture. Goal of my « Eclipse RCP/RAP with Spring DM, Spring Data JPA and Remoting » articles is to explain step by step how to develop a simple Eclipse RCP/RAP with those Spring technologies, shares several rules that we have discovered with Spring on OSGi context, and manages 2 architectures :

• Fat client.
• Client/Server by managing remoting with CXF DOSGi, ECF, Spring Remoting (with Spring’s HTTP invoker).

To follow those articles, you must know OSGi, Eclipse RCP:

• if you don’t know OSGi, Eclipse RCP, or Spring and you can read French, please read « Conception d’un client Eclipse RCP et serveur OSGI avec Spring DM« .
• if you don’t know Eclipse RAP, please read My first step with RAP.

You can read the next article [step1] which explains how to initialize Spring DM.