Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Trying out the Eclipse Rich Client Platform


I am trying my first RCP based application. A simple app with a few views and and editor just to get a feel of the power of the whole platform. Eventhough I have both the popular books The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse and Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins, they seem to be slightly out-of-date when I develop on RCP/ Eclipse 3.0. However they are very useful. I also took the help of a number of articles on the web, javadocs, source code of other plugins, etc.



It makes a lot of sense to people like me who aspire to develop products single-handedly or with very small team. To make it possible I would need powerful tools, platforms, languages and frameworks. In case I need to develop a desktop application in Java, RCP seems to be a good platform to work on. Similar to why I want to learn Lisp.



I will put up my application for download as soon as it is in a decent shape. Lets wait and see how it turns out ;)

In case you have any interesting product ideas to be implemented using the RCP, let me know.