I hear a lot of good stuff about Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). I also hear some criticism. Perhaps the most popular criticisms that I’ve heard has to do with the scope of RCP. Some members of the community have the opinion that RCP doesn’t go far enough. It’s concerned, they say, exclusively with issues of user interface. They say that higher-level support for things like persistence, communication, domain-specific models, and so on are necessary. Some even suggest that RAD tools would be nice. Strictly speaking, it isn’t true that RCP is exclusively concerned with user interface issues since RCP also provides a kick-butt component model thanks to the Equinox project, extreme extensibility, built-in update support, and so on (but who am I to argue with these rather abstract members of the community?)
I agree. All that would be nice. The funny thing is that we do already have much of the desired functionality. But what do we do about it? I’d love to learn your opinion on the topic.
In that spirit, we’re running the RCP Experience Workshop at Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE). If you’ve got experience building RCP applications, we’d love to have you there. If you’re thinking of starting with RCP, we’d also love to have you there. Heck, if you’re just remotely interested in RCP, I’d still love to meet you (even if you can’t make it to the workshop).
I have some simple goals for the workshop. I’d like to know what we can do to make the RCP experience better for everybody. I’d like to discuss how we might go about driving change (we can’t expect the Eclipse project to do all the work).
