Eclipse Rich Client Platform UI

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:

• Executive Summary of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform UI (includes excerpts from the documents below)

FAQs

• Rich Client Platform FAQ

Articles

• Rich Client Platform Tutorial - Part 1
• Rich Client Platform Tutorial - Part 2
• Rich Client Platform Tutorial - Part 3

Design documents

• Statement of Direction for the Eclipse Rich Client Platform UI
• Eclipse Rich Client Platform UI - Proposed Approach
• Overview of the Generic Workbench
• Generic Workbench Plug-in Structure

Example

To run the example (last updated June 11, 2004 for the 3.0 RC2 build):

1. Download the RCP Runtime build from the Downloads page, and extract it to a folder such as c:\browser-example.
2. Download the browser plugin zip and extract it to the eclipse/plugins subfolder.
3. Replace the eclipse/configuration/config.ini file with the appropriate config file from the browser plugin. For example, on Windows, copy eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.ui.examples.rcp.browser_3.0.0/config_win32.ini to eclipse/configuration/config.ini .
4. Run: eclipse.exe.

The browser example's source is available in the Eclipse CVS repository, in project org.eclipse.ui.examples.rcp.browser.