I'm going to defer replies to specific comments until more folks have had a
chance to respond, but the last two emails made me realize that I didn't
provide enough information on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

An Eclipse RCP application doesn't need to look anything like the Eclipse
IDE that we use for software engineering.  People have created RCP
applications for financial trading, rowing race management, RSS reading,
bio-informatic visualization and a bunch of other things.  You can find a
list of some examples of both open source and commercial RCP applications at
http://www.eclipse.org/community/rcp.php.

As I think everyone knows, the Eclipse IDE we know (and love?) is just a big
collection of plugins with some very minimalist glue to hold them all
together.  Almost everything in Eclipse is a plugin.  The fact that the most
common Eclipse starting point is a Java IDE is really just a packaging
choice, not something inherent to the architecture of the system.

It's possible to strip things done to a core set of plugins which provide
basics like actions, UI management, help, etc and use that as a framework
for a standalone application with it's own splash screen, UI design,
semantics and so on with no hint of CVS, Java, or other IDE artifacts.  The
last time I played with RCP was a couple of years ago, but at that point a
minimal RCP application was about 7.5 MB (on disk) which sounds like a lot,
but included in the initial cost is a lot of plumbing and infrastructure
support.

There is a good set of resources at
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Rich_Client_Platform which provides more
background. For those that like screencasts, there's an "Eclipse RCP in 10
minutes" screencast here http://www.eclipsezone.com/eps/10minute-rcp/.

Hope that helps explain my earlier cryptic reference to "RCP" a little
better.

Tom

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