Spring goes on the offensive

Have you heard of RCP (Rich Client Platform)? A rich client platform is meant to provide a full foundation on which you can build a desktop application with very little effort. If you’ve heard of RCP, you’ve probably noticed that until now the main contest has been between Eclipse RCP (built on the SWT GUI toolkit) and NetBeans RCP (built on the Swing GUI toolkit).

A third contender is stepping forward: Spring RCP, a subproject of the very popular Spring Framework. Spring RCP’s main focus is on a different level from the other two, as this quotation puts it:

The spring-rich developers strongly feel the old days of Swing apps not looking native and not being performant or web-accessible are gone with JDK1.4.2 and 1.5 and webstart. It is our belief the only problem with Swing is that there are a limited number of higher-level abstractions available that assist in making the toolkit simpler and easier to use, and a limited number of design best practices. The goal of spring-richclient is to provide that.

Focus

• Provide a way to build structured, highly-configurable, GUI-standards-following Swing applications faster by leveraging the Spring Framework.
• Foster integration with existing rich-client-related projects where it make sense. For example, jgoodies-forms and TableLayout are two good layout managers. We don’t need to develop another one.
• Adhere to the principles set forth by the Spring Framework — programming to interfaces; the importance of sound OO design, documentation, and testing.

Related articles

• TheServerSide.com — Spring Rich Client Framework Announced
• JavaLobby.com — Spring RCP 0.1.0 Released
• What’s happening in the IDE world — see the section on the battle for the RCP platform

Finally, for fans of the “classic” Spring Framework, here’s a podcast:
 Spring 2.0, an update by Rod Johnson, in which Rod Johnson discusses two important changes in version 2.0, extensible XML configuration and significant enhancements to Spring AOP (discussion on TSS: Spring 2.0, an update by Rod Johnson).