What is Eclipse RCP

The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) accelerates the development and deployment of desktop and embedded applications.  RCP builds on the modularity infrastructure supplied by Equinox by adding comprehensive GUI frameworks and facilities, sophisticated provisioning infrastructure, user assistance and many more elements found in common applications.  In short, it is all the gorp you need to create an application but don't want to write yourself.

Eclipse RCP is the basis of applications in industries worldwide including finance, transportation, space exploration, environmental monitoring, manufacturing etc.  Organizations big and small from NASA to the World Health Organization, JP Morgan, IBM and Adobe have adopted RCP as the basic building block for their business applications or products.

The RCP effort at Eclipse has been led by EclipseSource team members.

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Why Eclipse RCP

Infrastructure is not your business

Your core business is probably not about writing modular systems, GUI libraries or provisioning mechanisms. So, why spend your scarce development resources recreating what is already provided by Eclipse? Instead, you can take advantage of the frameworks and facilities in RCP and get out of the gorp.

World-class frameworks

The projects at Eclipse are a distillation of best practices and expert implementations. The frameworks have been created by professional developers whose main motivation is creating world-class solutions to particular problems.  By using RCP your application benefits from that expertise.

The bar is rising

Applications are getting more and more sophisticated.  Users expect more.  The bar on your application look and feel and function is rising.  RCP helps you clear the bar more easily and even raise the bar higher by enabling new integration of new interactions and  workflows.

RCP scales

Many scenarios involve many different sizes of application.  Small simple apps for handheld devices, power-user configurations, occasional user support, and so on.  RCP supports applications from just a few bundles to many thousands of bundles.  The same programming model can be used across the computing landscape and with RAP, you can single source your rich client and rich internet applications.

What is Eclipse 4 (e4)

RCP has, over the years, been a focus for innovation and new directions for the Eclipse project but always with the promise of tight continuity with previous releases. The Eclipse 4 (e4) project was created to allow developers to rethink the basic paradigms of RCP and create a basis for future developments in the project. The Eclipse 4 Application Platform is the result of these developments and represents a major innovation to the platform.

The core goals of Eclipse 4 are to decrease complexity and to make Eclipse applications visually more appealing. Eclipse 4 also introduces innovative programming techniques such as dependency injection, annotations and CSS styling. Further, it reduces complexity by providing a consistent model of the workbench based on EMF - the Eclipse Modeling Framework. All of these new directions have been implemented with a clearly laid migration path for RCP 3.x applications.

EclipseSource team members actively participate in the Eclipse 4 community. We offer training and consulting to make your existing RCP application ready for Eclipse 4 or support your application in the full software development cycle on the new platform.

Getting Started with RCP and Eclipse 4

Tutorial - Eclipse 4 Final Sprint - Part 1

Jonas Helming and Maximilian Koegel - April 2012

Register to download the first part in a tutorial series on Eclipse 4. The series introduces the new concepts of the Eclipse 4 Application Platform, aka RCP 2.0. The series starts with the foundation of every Eclipse 4 application, the application model. In the first part, we introduce the different options for modifying this model.

Webinar - Single Sourcing with RAP and RCP

Ralf Sternberg and Benjamin Muskalla - May 17, 2010

In this tutorial Ralf Sternberg and Benjamin Muskalla demonstrate how the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and the Rich Client Platform (RCP) are used to create both desktop and web application using a single code base.

No prior RAP experience is needed.

Presentation - Eclipse Rich Client Platform

Jeff McAffer - March 13, 2007

The main focus of this presentation is the development of rich client applications using Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). It discusses how and where rich client technology fits in the enterprise, and provides several examples of RCP applications. This presentation also discusses (at a high level) the Eclipse projects, community, eco-system, and foundation.