RCP Classes
The Rich Client Platform (RCP) provides a platform to run Eclipse plugins. This allows us to create an application with the extensible plug-in architecture of Eclipse itself. That is, an application which is not necessarily an IDE like Eclipse but allows plugins and so on.
Our RCP application can be constructed by Eclipse using these files:
- META-INF
- plugin.xml - plugin manifest
plus the following java classes, that is we create our own classes (yellow) which override eclipse classes (green) :
The best way to create these classes is use Eclipse and create a new plug-in project as shown below.
Installing
Usually I use the 'Reporting' Eclipse package as it has web tools etc. For RCP we need the 'RCP/Plugin' package, I don't know the best way to get all these to my installation? In the end I downloaded the RCP/Plugin package and copied the 'plugins' and 'features' directories and merged them in with my existing eclipse install (usr/share/eclipse).
Create RCP Project
There is a good tutorial at this site.
Open Eclipse and in the menu New -> Project
Adding Extensions
click on plugin.xml file.
Press the Add button to add each of the following extensions:
- org.eclipse.ui.commands - handles actions
- org.eclipse.ui.menus - defines menus
- org.eclipse.ui.bindings - key shortcuts
Creating Menu Options
