Explore Eclipse's embedded rich client platform: mobile devices need eclipse

Introduction: This article introduces the embedded rich client platform (embedded rich-clients PLATFORM,ERCP). You will learn the various components that make up the ERCP and get some examples of using them in your application.

Background

The purpose of the embedded rich client platform (ERCP) is to bring Eclipse's rich client platform (RCP) to the embedded domain.

ERCP is composed of the following components:

Standard Parts Toolkit (ESWT)-core, expansion and mobility extensions

Ejface

Eworkbench

Eupdate

We'll discuss each component and use the code example where appropriate.

ESWT

The embedded Standard Parts toolkit (ESWT) is a subset of the well-known Java™ graphics toolkit-The Standard Parts Toolkit (SWT). It provides a set of controls, panels, and other commonly used parts as a building block for the user interface. In addition to the parts that SWT has come to contain, ESWT has introduced a new component: Mobile extensions (a joint design by IBM, Nokia and Motorola), mainly for mobile devices such as PDAs and smartphones.

From the perspective of platform independence, the design of ESWT is different from that of its relative SWT. SWT uses a platform-independent approach to try to keep native code as simple as possible in order to improve portability between different operating systems. The problem: portability and performance are a couple of conflicting questions, so ESWT decided to take another approach: the Universal Graphics Layer (UGL), which still retains the native interface of Java (JNI) on the Native Toolkit implementation. However, UGL does not act as a one-to-one JNI wrapper and tries to keep the native implementation as close as possible, with only the information that needs to be recalled through JNI. The ESWT approach sacrifices portability because the native toolkit relies entirely on the graphics system it uses, but this approach greatly improves performance (the primary consideration on the mobile device).

The ESWT contains three components (see Figure 1):

Core

Extension of

Move extension

Figure 1. ESWT User Interface Toolkit