Rational Business Developer (RBD) and EGL Community Edition (EGL CE) both allow you to more easily develop Web 2.0 applications using a single language, EGL. With EGL, you can create a rich internet application (RIA) without having to learn a multitude of technologies like JavaScript, Java, HTML, or PHP. To develop RIAs using RBD or EGL CE, you write your application in EGL, and the tool generates JavaScript and Java. You'll need RBD, the enterprise level big brother of EGL CE, if you want to create COBOL, JSF, text or console applications.

If you have been using Rational Business Developer (RBD), you'll notice a few things are different in EGL CE. First, you'll probably notice that EGL CE has a single EGL perspective. For developing EGL, there is a single EGL editor that determines whether to show the Design and Preview tabs based on the content of the file opened. To create an EGL project, you are required to enter only a project name. Because it combines features from the General and Rich UI project types from RBD, a single EGL CE project can contain Rich UIs, Web services, or both. By default, each EGL CE project depends on the EGL Rich UI widget project and a Dojo runtime project. Simply drag-and-drop any of the widgets from the palette onto the visual editor in Design view. Use the Properties view to customize each widget and define events.

Like RBD, you can use EGL CE to code, preview, and debug RIAs before you deploy them to an application server. In EGL CE, services can be tested in Preview or debug using the service's source code if it's in your workspace or using the deployed version for existing services. Being able to see your application in action using Preview and Debug, make quick changes, and test again speeds up the development process a lot. Once you're happy with your application, you can deploy it.

Deployment in EGL CE is somewhat different too. EGL CE removed the need to switch between deployment and development modes since code is automatically generated for debug and target deployment (see the EGL CE Project Structure and Code Generation blog). For deployment in RBD, you select a single Rich UI handler to serve as the entry point to your application. In EGL CE, you can better control how your application is deployed using the Deployment Descriptor editor. By default, all Rich UI handlers create an HTML endpoint for each specified locale in EGL CE. You can edit the application's deployment descriptor (.egldd) to pick each Rich UI handler you want to have an HTML endpoint, and therefore you control the entry point URLs for your application. In the deployment descriptor, you can also determine what types of services to create such as SOAP or REST, and the service client bindings that tie your front-end user interfaces with the back-end services. Each deployment descriptor has one Web project as the target. If you want parts of your application to run on different targets, you can create multiple deployment descriptors, for example a descriptor to deploy Rich UIs to one target and another descriptor to deploy services to a second target. Currently, EGL CE supports deployment to Apache Tomcat.

So if you want to develop Web 2.0 applications quickly and efficiently, try EGL CE. We think learning a single language like EGL will make your life easier, as well as reduce the strain on your bookshelf since you won't need a bunch of reference manuals. And it's free, so you can try it without asking your boss for a purchase order.

And remember, the C in EGL CE stands for community. We encourage comments and feedback from you, the EGL community. Feel free to ask questions in the forum, comment on blog posts, or contact us to write a blog post yourself. Let us know what you think! We'd love to hear from you.