The rich client platform (RCP) is a major theme for Eclipse 3.0. This is the main plan item:
Enable Eclipse to be used as a rich client platform. Eclipse was designed as a universal tool integration platform. However, many facets and components of Eclipse are not particularly specific to IDEs and would make equal sense in non-IDE applications (e.g., window-based GUI, plug-ins, help system, update manager). The Eclipse Platform should factor out and segregate IDE-specific facilities (e.g., everything having to do with workspace resources) so that a subset of it can be used as a rich client platform for building applications. [Platform Core, Platform UI, Platform Update] [Theme: Rich client platform] (36967)
Additional plan items cover other important issues such as adding and removing plug-ins dynamically.
Note: The following documents are under active development and are being updated by the Eclipse team on an ongoing basis to reflect the latest thinking. The goal is to carve a UI for the rich client platform out of the Eclipse Platform UI. By the nature of this kind of work, it's difficult to plan everything in advance of actually doing the work; so we're not even going to try. Instead, we are revising these documents as we incrementally make our way towards a satisfactory solution:
FAQ:
Articles:
Design documents:
Examples: