Developing Enterprise Business Applications in Eclipse RCP

This tutorial emerges out of the combined experience the presentor gained while working on a large Eclipse RCP/J2EE enterprise application (2.3 million lines of code in the RCP application). It will address the gap between the standard functionality of Eclipse RCP and what is needed for the creation of polished highly usable business applications.

The first generation of web applications sacrificed usability and function for ease of deployment. Recently the industry has shifted back to richer user interfaces written in Ajax, Flash, and Java. Many business applications have requirements such as offline access, desktop integration, and UI customizations that make using Ajax and Flash difficult to near impossible. For such applications rich client architectures featuring online deployment and web enabled client/server communications provide the easiest path to development success. Eclipse's Rich Client Platform provides organizations a valuable jumpstart in the creation of such applications. Eclipse RCP allows enterprise applications to reclaim the powerful user interface paradigms that were lost with the emergence of thin clients, while retaining the benefits of server-side scalability, security, and reliability. However, a number of the core functions of such business applications are not handled transparently by Eclipse RCP out of the box.

About Scott Delap

Scott Delap is President of Rich Client Solutions, Inc., a software consulting firm focusing on technologies such as Swing, Eclipse RCP, GWT, Flex, and Open Laszlo. He is actively involved in the Java community, speaking at events such as NFJS, QCon and JavaOne. Scott is also the Java Editor of InfoQ.com and runs ClientJava.com, a portal focused on desktop Java development.

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