Eclipse Nights
In this last week I ‘ve begun to study and use seriously the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. My goal is to understand if RCP can be a good solution for java desktop applications.
So far my experience is not completely satisfactory. On one hand, the platform itself is powerful, and you can get a lot of things done just writing a bunch of small and relatively simple classes. With JFace you have a lot of pre-build components and, since their source code is open, they are also good pieces of documentation.
On the other hand, RCP sometimes it’s frustrating, frustrating… frustrating. I’m using the book “The Java Developer’s Guide to Eclipse” as my main guide but, despite its 1000+ pages, it barely covers the vastness of subjects you need to know to develop a complete RCP application. The documentation online it’s nice (I mean: simple, colorful, buzzword-compliant!), but far from exhaustive, and also Eclipse newsgroups (eclipse.platform, for instance) are rather disappointing… the traffic is low (for such a big project) and some questions remain unanswered.
At the end, the only real and effective way to learn RCP is to read its source code and debug. Ok, it’s interesting but enormously time-consuming. I’m planning to post some tricks and tips I’m learning along the way, so if you are interested come back soon!
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