Practical Eclipse Rich Client Platform Projects (Practical Projects) (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: report designer, tree graph, report viewer, Plug-in Project, Click Next, Web Browser (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Eclipse and the Rich Client Platform (RCP) together form a leading development platform. It provides a lightweight software component framework based on plug–ins. In addition to allowing Eclipse to be extended using other programming languages, it provides the key to the seamless integration of tools with Eclipse. The RPC gives Eclipse its modularity: Eclipse employs plug–ins in order to provide all of its functionality on top of (and including) the RCP, in contrast to some other applications where functionality is typically hard–coded. RCP apps are platform independent: they can be built for all major operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and Mac from a single code base. And the RCP provides a professional look and feel for applications.

Practical Eclipse Rich Client Platform Projects is a clear and technical guide for Eclipse developers to help them enhance their knowledge and achieve their goals quickly.

• The book explains the technical concepts easily and in an engaging way.
• The text provides plenty of source code and images as learning aids.
• Several practical projects and case studies are included.

What you’ll learn

• Understand RCP basics, architecture, and foundations.
• Use and incorporate plug–ins with Eclipse.
• Design and develop user interface components and work with the Eclipse FormsAPIs.
• Add and integrate 2D graphics using the Graphical Editing Framework.
• Build professional–looking and functional reports with Eclipse BIRT.
• Create visually more dynamic 3D graphics by incorporating OpenGL into Eclipse.
• Add help support and automated updates via the Update Manager.

Who is this book for?

The primary audience of this book will be developers and software engineers involved in user interface development with the Eclipse platform. Also, this book will be valuable to scientists, students, practitioners, and all those interested in multiplatform user interface development.

About the Apress Practical Series

The Practical series from Apress is your best choice for getting the job done, period. From professional to expert, this series lets you apply project–motivated templates (or frameworks) step by step in a very direct, practical, and efficient manner toward current real–world projects that may be sitting on your desk. So whatever your career goal, Apress can be your trusted guide to take you where you want to go on your IT career empowerment path.

About the Author

Vladimir Silva holds a master’s degree in computer science from Middle Tennessee State University. He worked for four years for IBM as a research engineer where he acquired extensive experience in distributed and grid computing research. Vladimir is a highly technical, focus–based individual and team player. He belongs to two National Honor Societies and has published many computer science articles for IBM and is author of Grid Computing for Developers (Charles River Media, 2005).

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 12, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430218274
• ISBN-13: 978-1430218272
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #393,092 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars It's a pretty decent introduction to Eclipse RCP application development., November 1, 2009

By	Roby E. Gamboa (SF Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Disclaimer: I tend to strain the limits of most software development frameworks, so I'm probably not the best source of review material for introductory programming references. That said, this book provided some valuable insight into how to best structure plugin and feature projects in Eclipse in order to develop a non-trivial RCP application.

I am also starting to work on RAP (Rich Ajax Platform) applications, and a lot of the information and implementation patterns in this reference carried over to that development platform as well.

There were some aspects of programming for RCP that I was looking for, but haven't been able to find yet. Specifically:

- Interacting with the Equinox OSGi container to provide more advanced deployment models.
- Detailed information for enabling different help/documentation capabilities in an RCP application, other than the base-level capabilities of the environment.
- Working with Plugin-Target Environment definitions to provide tailored runtime environments for use with developed RCP applications.
- Use of custom widgets with RCP applications (definition of custom widgets is normally found in an SWT/JFace reference, what I was looking for was effective packaging and use of these custom controls in the context of an overall RCP application).
- Tailoring build settings and Plugin Update functionality to integrate with products that generate OS-native installers for the first deployment of an RCP application. Once an RCP (or other plugin) application has been deployed for the first time, use of an update site is advised and fairly straightforward to accomplish using this reference as a guide. Getting the RCP application into, say, an RPM image for Linux or an MSI image for Windows so that it can be part of a managed desktop environment...that wasn't nearly as straightforward.

Overall, though, I did find that I referred back to this reference pretty frequently, which is my main criteria for a good programming reference. It did an effective job of staying in the scope of RCP development, rather than trying to absorb too much of Eclipse plugin design. I will be looking forward to the next edition, and will definitely be on the lookout for references on Equinox, RAP, and more advanced plugin development, though, to properly augment my Eclipse bookshelf.