Thanks for the response. It’s going to be a couple of months before I can undertake something like this. Hopefully there will be more learning resources for E4 RCP by that time.

I’ll be back with more questions then.

I’d certainly check out E4 as a possibility; one of our main goals was to make E4’s learning curve shallower, you can tell us if we succeeded…;-). Get E4 0.9 and try out the e4Photo and Contacts demos to get a feel for what’s involved.

Working with the 0.9 Tech Preview will have its challenges (i.e. the API’s aren’t fixed and -will- change over the next year…) but that’s a two way street. We’re extremely interested in getting ‘real’ feedback on our approaches so your input would be valuable to us and, indeed, will help drive the final design. This also means that you’ll likely get prompt attention to any snags you hit, after all we *want* you to succeed and we’re still at the point where we can address any architectural issues you might uncover.

I’m developing a Java application for my own use and it is in the mode where I add a new feature or fix a bug and then run the application a few times, then repeat the develop and run cycle. It will be in this mode for several months, at least.

It’s getting to the point where I could use a GUI. I was considering Adobe Air and JavaFX since this is a desktop application that will eventually run on the web. I also thought about using RCP and adding Web Service connectivity when the app. moves from the desktop to the web. Since e4 is being built to accomodate applications that run on both desktop and web, maybe that would be a better way to go.

Given that there is quite a learning curve with RCP, maybe I would be better off climbing the e4 RCP learning curve than the Eclipse Galileo RCP learning curve.

Is this a viable thing to do in the near future (writing an e4 RCP GUI), or do I need to wait until e4 matures some more?

Are there good resources available now to learn e4 RCP development?

Thanks.

Dean

I do share your excitement! I’ve also blogged extensively about the “perfect platform” [3]. A few comments:

- You guys should talk to the GWT people as much as possible. They are doing incredible work, GWT version 2.0 is going to be amazing, also as a platform.

- One big thing that GWT is missing and that Eclipse has (via OSGi) is true modularity. Very useful when collaborating with other people on a project. Some kind of client-side modularity mechanism plus server-side modules would result in a great platform.

- Not enough standard widgets is another GWT problem. If GWT had the Eclipse community behind it, I’d suspect that that would quickly change.

- More of my unfulfilled GWT wishes and a brief overview of 2.0 are posted at http://2ality.blogspot.com/2009/06/gwts-future-20-and-my-wishes.html

- GUI layout for web apps is the thing that sucks most on that platform. Help is on the way [4], until then, drawing to Canvas (like Bespin does) is intriguing. Unfortunately, MS Internet Explorer does not support Canvas, yet.

- While RAP is technically impressive, it is also complicated (e.g. one cannot start all the demos in different tabs at the same time) and slow. I would hope for a simpler and faster long-term solution.

[1] http://hypergraphs.de/
[2] http://hypergraphs.de/facetator/
[3] http://2ality.blogspot.com/search/label/eclipse
[4] http://2ality.blogspot.com/2009/07/css-layout-soon-good-enough-for-guis.html