Eclipse RCP Best Practices

Getting Started

  1. Introduction
  2. Know where to get help
  3. Use RCP for the right reasons
  4. Use the correct version of RCP
  5. Use the correct tools
  6. Set up a target platform
  7. Mirror Eclipse repositories
  8. Create a product configuration
  9. Define products with feature based dependencies
  10. Remove versions from product dependencies
  11. Always run code using a product configuration
  12. Get your product building right away

Welcome to a new feature of the Modular Mind website, an attempt to catalog a set of best practices for developing Eclipse Rich Client Platform applications. I’ve been accumulating these best practices over the years and figure it’s time to do a brain dump. Hopefully this effort will spare others from the painful mistakes I’ve made.

This will not primarily be a set of tips and tricks, though there will be a few scattered around. And I’m going to do my best to avoid long-winded technical descriptions of the platform. There are books and tutorials available that cover most of this information. What I will include here are my opinions on the best way to do RCP development. 

I thought about writing a book, but to me a set of online posts allows for more community interaction. I want to present these practices in a way that provokes discussion and corrections if needed.  I reserve the right to update the text of these posts based on new information and your constructive criticism. I’ll of course give credit where credit is due.

The first post in this series should be posted tomorrow and hopefully more will arrive fairly frequently after that.