I would go through the effort of actually making a shell app to figure out how 
to get things to build right before you make a decision ... RCP is nice, but 
it's complex, and the build environment for it is complex. Particularly if you 
want to spit out a linux or windows binary -- i only produce OS X binaries of 
RCP apps, so I don't know about cross-building. However, I DO know the build 
environment is a pain, especially if you want to make it headless. It's also a 
lot more complicated to work with (debug, etc) than a Swing app. You also need 
to accept that out of the box it's going to look like Eclipse, which can be a 
turn off.  I suspect it's probably faster and less pain to get a Swing app 
going in these environments, but RCP will ultimately give you the 
closer-to-native experience than Swing will.

ms

On Jan 4, 2010, at 1:22 PM, Larry Mills-Gahl wrote:

> Does anybody have experience/advice in building a rich client app based on 
> Eclipse RCP?
> The app is a data entry utility that needs to operate in offline mode as well 
> as connect to a web service. The general idea is to do data entry to a local 
> (derby or sqllite) db and then do a bulk export/upload. Sychronization and 
> validation will happen (mostly) on the main server, but the offline app will 
> do some validation and sync some data (for lookup lists) when the network is 
> available (on export or upload for instance). 
> I would like to use as much of the model and controller infrastructure from 
> the web app as possible and use the eclipse platform to provide the app with 
> cross-platform environment. 
> 
> I've got the web app and command line tools using the same model and 
> controllers (for the most part) and that makes my life much easier. One of 
> the last bits of old ad-hoc tools is this offline data entry piece and my 
> goal is to be able to build this for Mac, Linux and Windows. I'm leaning 
> toward Eclipse RCP at this time because it's familiar and I like having the 
> infrastructure of Eclipse to build on.
> 
> It's early enough in the process that any experience, advice, comments are 
> appreciated and there is still time to make changes. I have an opportunity 
> now to replace the existing offline methods before we roll out a number of 
> new clients so I need to get a proof of concept working pretty quickly.
> 
> 
> 
> Larry Mills-Gahl _______________________________________________
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