Wednesday, December 23, 2009

A brush with Eclipse RCP

In my current job I seem to do quite a bit of UI work. The nice thing is that since my company is a start-up, the possibilities (in terms of technology at least) are unlimited. In the last year I've written GUIs using C# & WPF, Swing, and JavaFX. This time we were looking to create a 'system monitoring application' which should be able to present different types of information:

  • Tables
  • Graphs
  • Charts
  • Trees
  • etc...
The application also had to be easily extensible. While I personally have a fair amount of experience in GUI development, my two junior colleagues have done much less UI work. So it was just as important that the technology we choose has a gentle learning curve. Given a 4 week sprint we don't have much time to 'waste'. I have evaluated our options:
  • JavaFx: low level, lack of tools and out of box components
  • Swing: low level, good tools
  • SWT: low level
  • NetBeans platform: have personal experience
  • Eclipse RCP: unknown
It was clear that given the extensibility requirement we needed a platform. It came down to a choice between NetBeans Platform and Eclipse RCP. In the end I chose Eclipse RCP because I was able to step through this tutorial with complete ease and I felt that even though I have experience with the NetBeans platform my team mates would be faster in picking up the Eclipse RCP way of doing things.

Now, a month later, I have to say that I believe that my decision was the right one. After 3 days of tutorials and reading we were ready to go. Ultimately we have created a UI which is modular (with multiple self contained plugins), looks and feels the way our client expects, and will be easy to extend. In addition, majority of the actual UI work (using JFace, SWT, databinding, Eclipse RCP APIs) was done by my colleagues while I focused on the data models.

While I would take the NetBeans IDE over the Eclipse IDE for most things I am quite happy with the way our RCP based project turned out given the requirements.

3 comments:

celeraman+ said...

You must to know the great RCPForms (released under EPL), a "enhancing UI Forms, Data Binding and puts them together to offer a profound framework for creating, binding and validating forms in Eclipse."

Info:
http://www.mvmsoft.de/content/plugins/rcpforms/rcpforms.htm

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rcpforms/

Lars Vogel said...

Sounds great that my RCP Tutorial help you selecting the technologie.

Cheers, Lars

Zero Effort said...

hi lars,
they definitely did help us plenty, i would go as far as to say that without those tutorials i would have picked the netbeans platform.
also has anyone ever told you that in your pictures you look very much like adam sandler? :) that was also important when deciding whether to trust your tutorials or not! :)
cheers and thanks for putting the knowledge out there!
karel