Chapter 13. Looking beyond SWT/JFace: the Rich Client Platform

So far, we’ve discussed how SWT serves as a general-purpose toolset for building GUI applications. We’ve also shown how JFace provides more specialized capabilities (Actions, Contributions, and Viewers) like those in the Eclipse platform. These aspects of JFace simplify the development process, as long as your GUI’s operation resembles that of the Eclipse Workbench.

To conclude this book, we’d like to take this progression one step further. Instead of just using behavioral aspects of the Workbench, we’ll now explore building complete, custom applications that look and function like Eclipse. We’ll call them (lowercase) workbenches. Like JFace GUIs, they provide a great deal of functionality but remain simple to code.

This exciting capability is made possible by Eclipse’s new Rich Client Platform (RCP). With RCP, not only can you create workbenches quickly, but you can also compile them into standalone applications. So, you won’t need the entire Eclipse platform to run your GUIs.

13.1. Understanding RCP workbenches

13.2. RCP: Looking under the hood

13.3. Adding views and perspectives

13.4. Populating forms with Eclipse Forms widgets

13.5. Building a standalone RCP application

13.6. Summary