Ebook: Practical Eclipse Rich Client Platform Projects

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.