Eclipse Releases Riena 1.0 Rich Client Platform

The Eclipse Foundation announced on March 2 the release of Eclipse Riena 1.0, "a platform for developing multitier rich client applications based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and Equinox."

Prior to this release, Riena was an Eclipse incubator project. As a mature Eclipse project, Riena 1.0 "provides a set of major components and is now available for download at www.eclipse.org/riena. … Riena was established as an open-source project within the Eclipse community in February 2008," the foundation said in a news release. The release said:

Riena provides a platform for building distributed enterprise applications that simplify the user interface development and the integration of back-end systems. Core to Riena is an OSGi [Open Services Gateway Initiative]-based Remote Services Component that allows developers to easily create distributed client/server applications.

Equinox is Eclipse project that provides an implementation of OSGI. It is basically a plug-in system that allows developers to implement an application in a set of "bundles" using common services and infrastructure.

"Riena 1.0 is a great example of innovative run-time technology that is being developed at Eclipse," Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said in the statement. "Projects like Riena help support the growth of Equinox and Eclipse RCP as a solution for developing enterprise applications."

According to the statement:

The 1.0 release of Riena delivers a set of components based on Equinox and the Eclipse RCP. These components include:

- Remote Services allows for the communication and coordination between OSGi-based components on a client and server, enabling truly distributed component deployment.

- Riena User Interface and Navigation Components provide developers with the frameworks and building blocks that accelerate the development of the client user experience for business-centric applications.

- Object Transaction allows developers to isolate the object level changes on a client application before communicating those changes to a server. This enables more efficient client/server communication and client rollback of changes.

- Authentication and Authorization extend the Equinox Security model to allow for security in a distributed system.

- Client Monitoring is a server component that tracks the status of each client in a distributed system.

"We have already received extremely positive user feedback regarding Riena," Christian Campo, project group leader of Eclipse Riena and an IT consultant at Compeople, said in a statement. "The availability of the first release will allow even more developers to use the Riena platform for their mission-critical business applications."

Eclipse officials said the Riena project will be part of "the Galileo release train, a coordinated release of different Eclipse projects that is due [to ship at the end of] June 2009. In addition, the second release of Riena is already in planning and will include enhanced features and components for the development of user interfaces and navigation."