Eclipse RCP

Submitted by ckelley on Thu, 01/07/2010 - 11:37

Standalone Zcore projects use the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RPC) as a container for the applications used to render the user interface, persist data, and perform administrative tasks. An earlier version of the standalone cobbled together Tomcat and MySQL, but the installation process was cumbersome. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RPC) provides a very nice bootstrap to creating full applications. What RCP accomplishes is significant:

  • Open source
  • Nice user interface toolkit (called SWT)
  • Very good documentation
  • Free development tools
  • Easy-to-deploy

Data are stored in the embedded database Derby. Derby is an open source version of an IBM product called Cloudscape. It's a pretty feature-complete implementation of the SQL-92 standard.

An embedded web server, Apache Tomcat, is used to render the user interface. The use of Tomcat enables Zcore developers to use common HTML/JSP skills and follow a quick web development process not usually associated with rich client application development.

Links to Eclipse RCP pages on this site:

The RCP application is in the "app" directory. It includes a reduced-size Java Run-time Engine (JRE), avoiding the need to install Java. It logs to a file called rti.log. The Updater is initiated from the RCP application before the web application is started.