Build your Eclipse RCP products

How to understand and use Eclipse Production Configuration

This article provides step-by-step guidance to help you take advantage of Eclipse's Production Configuration and PDE to package and manage Rich-Client Platform (RCP) applications as products with your own brand. In addition to some common concepts, such as the color and size of splash screen and icon files, this article introduces the advanced branding aspects of production configuration: RCP executables and their configuration files, progress bars and messages, RCP window images, about dialog boxes and welcome pages, such as introduction. With this article, you can grasp the essentials of encapsulating an RCP application as a distributed product that is independent of the Eclipse platform.

Before Eclipse V3.1 introduced Production Configuration, RCP developers faced the problem of how to efficiently and efficiently package and deliver RCP projects with the necessary plug-ins. This problem is actually a problem that affects usage, because it essentially determines the distribution and availability of its software. Thanks to the new Production Configuration features of Eclipse V3.1, you can now easily package your applications with dependencies and branding elements. This article details how to make a sample RCP application using Eclipse Product Configuration: A game called Frog across River.

To get the most out of this article, you need an ECLIPSE development environment and sample code. If Eclipse is not installed, download it from this address:

JRE V1.5.0 or later; running Eclipse requires a Java Runtime environment (Java Runtime ENVIRONMENT,JRE)

Eclipse Platform or IBM Rational Software Development Platform V7. X

Sample code in the Download section

Prerequisites: RCP Application

The Eclipse Product Configuration is predicated on an existing RCP application. You need it as the boot entry for the product. In this section, you will develop a game as an RCP application by using the following instructions: Frog across River. This RCP application is a plug-in project that expands org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications extensions and plays a portal role in the product. You can also choose to skip this section and import the entire project (see the Downloads section) with the downloads included with this article to get the sample RCP program for the later scenario.

To create the sample RCP plug-in

First, build a plug-in project by following these steps. Start Eclipse by selecting Window > Open perspective > Other ... > Plug-in Development switch to the plugin development perspective.

From the Eclipse menu, select File > New > Project ... > Plug-in Development > Plug-in project and click Next.

On the Plug-in Project Wizard page, enter COM.EXAMPLE.ZYX as the project name and click Next.

On the Plug-in Content Wizard page, accept all default settings and click Yes for the "Would you like to create a rich client application" option, and then click Next.

On the Templates Wizard page, select the Hello RCP template and click Finish. You will then see that a project named Com.example.zyx appears in the workspace.