Eclipse RCP: Platform for building platforms

There is a certain periodicity of technology. After a period of dominance by thin clients, the rich client technology began its return. A large number of organizations are building their applications into rich clients, many of which build their applications on the basis of RCP (Eclipse Rich client Platform). The term rich client first indicates that the application provides a rich experience for the user; second, it also indicates that the application is a client of a server. Although rich clients do not have to have corresponding server components, they usually have corresponding server components.

Rich clients are similar to FAT clients in many ways. Both give users a local desktop experience and provide information and functionality that is difficult, inconvenient, or impossible to deliver through thin-client technology. However, rich clients can provide more good features. Fat clients are usually a large, monolithic application that is difficult to deploy and update, while rich clients are lighter in size and are based on relatively easy component models for deployment and update. Historically, fat clients are platform-specific, and today's rich-client technology is a powerful feature of the underlying platform, while hiding the details of the underlying platform, allowing developers to focus on tasks rather than special details on a variety of special platforms.

Rich clients also have better scalability compared to fat clients. Traditionally, fat clients are connected directly to the database. This limits the running environment of the FAT client (the firewall may limit the connection between the FAT client and the database), and the scalability of the application (the total number of connections between the client and the server) may also be limited by the database. The rich client usually takes advantage of the application server, which is responsible for establishing a connection to the database. This configuration is very flexible (firewall-friendly) and has a high degree of scalability. Of course, the technology does not necessarily limit the fat client and the application server to communicate things, but in the Fat client technology is popular, the application server has not appeared.

There is no rule that a rich client application must be a client of a corresponding server. Many organizations that utilize rich client technology are building robust, scalable, updatable, and localized stand-alone applications. Similarly, although rich clients typically take advantage of application servers, there are no rules or technical limitations that require this. There is no reason to say that rich client applications cannot access the database directly.

Rich client technology represents the combination of rich client and thin client advantage: Extensive user experience, high scalability, platform independence, and very easy to deploy and update.

Eclipse RCP is a feature located at the heart of the Eclipse platform. When most people think of eclipse, they think of the Java Integrated development environment (IDE). If you peel the content about the IDE in Eclipse, the rest is a core that provides basic workbench functionality, including support for removable and scalable window components (editors and views), menus, toolbars, buttons, tables, tree structures, and so on. This core feature is Eclipse RCP.

Eclipse RCP provides applications developers with the following:

• Consistent and local appearance of applications and features

• Public application services such as window management, update management, Help, and selection management

• Local appearance, leveraging the actual platform window widgets on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and embedded devices

• Standardized component models

• Popularization of scalability

• Integrated update mechanism

• Top-level development tools (Eclipse Software Development Kit (SDK) is a world-class software development environment)

Although this term is not actually appropriate, eclipse RCP can still be viewed as a middleware for building rich client applications. It provides the infrastructure required by the application, allowing developers to focus on core application features rather than specifics. Stop wasting time: Use Eclipse RCP now.

Component

Eclipse RCP is made up of many components, each of which is responsible for the functionality of the corresponding parts of the environment. In fact, almost all of Eclipse RCP is made up of components, and every part of RCP is a component, with the exception of a small number of boot code. In the eclipse world, components are more often referred to as plug-ins (or as packages in OSGi terms). The term "plugin" indicates that the functionality of this component is in part level two, or that it is just an add-on to the built-in functionality. But that is not the case; Eclipse RCP treats all plug-ins equally, and there is no clear conceptual boundary between the built-in and custom Plug-ins. The plug-ins that you create to implement application behavior can be run with plug-ins that make up Eclipse RCP.

Typically, the development of rich client applications starts with a single plug-in. In a separate plug-in, you can define the entire user interface, business logic, and object model for your application. Creating a new Eclipse RCP application is easy, you just select menu item File>new>project ..., choose to create a new plug-in project, and then follow the steps in the wizard that appears. On the content page of the wizard, for the question "Would you like to create a rich-client application?" (Do you want to build a rich client application?), and remember to select Yes. The Templates page of the wizard is shown in Figure 1, where we choose to create the RCP application with a view (RCP application with views).

Figure 1. New Plug-in Project Wizard Templates page

This creates a new plug-in that contains the required portions of the RCP application, including the Workbench (menu bar and toolbar) settings and a single view containing a table (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The wizard has created an RCP application with full functionality