Developing Your First Eclipse RCP Application

An anonymous reader writes "The objective of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is to enable Eclipse to be used in a wide range of end-user applications that are not integrated development environments (IDEs). With the release of Eclipse V3.1, it is easy to create RCP applications. This tutorial will guide you step by step in building your very own RCP application."

Bugmenot

[kevin_conaway]

I've never seen a developerworks article that required a login/password but this one does. Bugmenot [bugmenot.com] has several though.

Anyways, has anyone actually used RCP. How does it compare to Swing?

Re:Bugmenot

[g051051]

RCP and Swing are two different things. You want to compare SWT and Swing. And that's a Holy War I'm not inclined to get involved in.

I'm using RCP to develop an in-house application, and I'm very impressed. Once you get over the huge learning curve (because the RCP framework encompasses such a large set of functionality), it's very nice. The Eclipse PDE is a nice dvelopment environment. The plugin metaphor is very powerful, and seems to work quite well. I'm also using the EMF (Eclipse Modelling Framework), and purchased WindowBuilder Pro [windowbuilderpro.com] to help out with the GUI work.

Re:Bugmenot

[ultranova]

RCP and Swing are two different things. You want to compare SWT and Swing. And that's a Holy War I'm not inclined to get involved in.

Swing comes with the JRE and is good enough. SWT requires you to bundle the support libraries to each platform your application has to work in. SWT may or may not be better than Swing for the developer, but it introduces platform dependencies beyond having to have the JRE, and it likely won't give any benefits for the end user. It certainly doesn't guarantee decent speed -

Sign In

[JoeCoder7]

Seems to require a username and password From bugmenot.com: wchlib library

Someone tell IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

... that the current version of Eclipse is 3.2.

Re:Someone tell IBM

[H0p313ss]

... that the current version of Eclipse is 3.2.

Why is this a troll? 3.1 was released a year ago, 3.2 has been out for almost a month. Fully functional beta builds have been available for months.

An article this out of date is downright embarrassing, or should be to whoever approved it.

Ugh! dreadful

[hey!]

I wouldn't bother. This has to be about the worst tutorial I've ever seen.

It doesn't even show you any actual code. It takes you through the process of using the IDE, and instructions to paste code (which it doesn't show) from other projects (that you don't have) into files generated by the IDE. In short, it shows you things you could figure out yourself, doesn't show you the things you couldn't.

It would make more sense just to study the examples provided, or to go to the eclipse RCP web site and look at the far superior tutorials there.

Eclipse RCP Success Stories

[QuantumFTL]

At Cornell University, my masters project was a snakelike robot arm and companion software control system. With a team of 19 engineers, we put something pretty impressive together, and the only reason we were able to get as far as we did with the GUI was that we used Eclipse RCP as the basis for our program. I've found the interfaces to be very clean and well documented, and the sheer amount of work that Eclipse did for us, both as an IDE and as an RCP framework was amazing.

I also worked with using Eclipse RCP as the basis for the Maestro [nasa.gov] scientific analysis and high-level rover planning software, which is currently used on MER and is scheduled to be used on several future exploration and technology missions. Because the program is considered "class A mission critical," it must either be written entirely from scratch, or use a framework which is very stable and has good vendor support. JPL uses a lot of FOSS, and Eclipse RCP was a wonderful tool for our purposes. I used Eclipse to great effect while helping to develop the Science Activity Planner (the public version of which was also called Maestro and covered on slashdot here [slashdot.org]).

SWT and Swing contrasted

[aahmad]

For those trying to decide whether to choose the swing toolkit or the eclipse RCP for your next development project, the following may be useful: http://www.ahmadsoft.org/articles/swingswt/swingsw t.html [ahmadsoft.org]