Introducing EBERT

I blogged last week about an example application that I’ve been building. Building good examples is pretty hard: you want an example to be simple enough to understand. At the same time, it has to be real enough to useful and expose real issues. I think that this application strikes a reasonable balance. The Eclipse Business Expense Reporting and Tracking (EBERT) application is a relatively small, but provides a valuable service. At least as a business traveler who has to work with Excel-based expense forms, it’s valuable to me.

Here’s a snapshot of the RCP version of EBERT:

Here’s what it looks like in RAP:

Note that the RAP version is running in a browser embedded in an Eclipse editor. It also runs fine in a regular browser like Firefox.

Here’s what it looks like in eRCP running on a Nokia E90:

You’ll notice some similarities and some differences. The really cool part is that some 90% of the code (estimate) is exactly the same across platforms. That 90%—the exact same code without recompiling, repackaging, or manipulation of any sort—is deployed on the desktop, the server, and a phone. This is one of the great things about Equinox and the various runtime platforms at Eclipse: the exact same component model, Equinox, is used everywhere.

Here’s a high-level architecture of what’s going on:

The common bundles—those in the middle—contain most of the interesting behaviour. Specifically, these two bundles contain the basic business models (core), and the various views and custom widgets (ui). Underneath these common components are the various runtime platforms which all themselves sit on Equinox (actually, the E90 uses Prosyst‘s implementation of OSGi).

At the top are the various “application” bundles. Each of these bundles pulls the pieces together for one of the platforms. The “application” bundles provide some customization of the views, and—in the case of the eRCP version—some navigation glue that manages the views in the absence of perspectives (which are not supported on eRCP due to screen space limitations).

Yesterday, I (finally) submitted it to the Eclipse IP review process as the initial contribution for the Eclipse Examples project (CQ 2310). There’s still a lot of work to do (the application doesn’t quite live up to the Examples project’s values yet), but we should hopefully soon have some code where you can find it, look at it, and maybe contribute.