RCP

The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is successfully used in a variety of industries.

As one of the most widely used and established development environments, the Eclipse IDE is the tool of choice for many software developers to implement their projects. In particular, the high flexibility of the platform, achieved by various plug-ins and extensions, contributes significantly to the great popularity and versatility of the Eclipse IDE.

However, the Eclipse platform offers more than just a flexible and convenient development environment: The underlying platform provides an extensive open source framework, which facilitates the development of rich client applications with Java in many places and structures them in a meaningful way using established standards. The Eclipse RCP framework is continuously being developed within the Eclipse platform's development cycle and presents itself as a solid technology that can be successfully used for commercial projects.

Generally speaking, an "Eclipse RCP" application is used when it is a rich client software based on the Eclipse platform, but is not primarily used as a development tool for software. Consequently, the basic structures and mechanisms of the Eclipse IDE are found in every Eclipse RCP application. For this reason, earlier RCP applications often have the reputation of having a very Eclipse-like appearance. In fact, in some situations this similarity can even turn out to be an exclusion criterion for the use of the Eclipse RCP framework, since the paradigm of editors and context-dependent views known from the Eclipse IDE, which is absolutely useful for use in a software development environment, does not always harmonize with the concrete application scenario. In most cases, however, the advantages of the framework outweigh all other advantages, which has been significantly improved by structural adjustments, especially with version 4. x of the Eclipse platform.