The Eclipse IDE has made a big change in the 3.0 release. The framework used for the plug-in model, and the system services have been “unbolted” from the IDE. This new layer is called the Rich Client Platform (RCP). After spending a few days going through the plug-in class material, reading doc, and writing sample code I’ve convinced of one thing – it could be easier. The documentation is lacking. The only online tutorials for RCP are not real useful, but they do show the most complicated Hello World sample I’ve ever seen! That being said, I like it and am starting to use it for the card game platform. Is it better than NetBeans for RC? I don’t know. So far the widget library (SWT) has made me want to use the Swing widget library, which I’ve never liked. Time will tell…
