Solutions for Creating RCP Applications

Companies using traditional methods of application development, testing and deployment often find it hard to release applications on-time and within budget. Normally, rich-client cross-platform applications are hard to write because they involve many lines of intricate code to handle things like windowing, update management, multithreading, and other complex low-level details. Writing code to test the interface, manually testing each element of the GUI and even releasing and deploying an application can be time-consuming and result in errors.

Quickly Generate GUIs

Developers often spend a lot of time writing code to control things like how a window is positioned rather than concentrating on the unique business elements of the application. Increasingly, developers are using the Eclipse RCP architecture to create rich-client applications. Eclipse RCP and Instantiations RCP Developer™ are ideal solutions in developing applications with rich interactivity because RCP development can be done in one tool, the application can run on a variety of platforms, and it is easy and efficient to build consistent user interfaces (UI). The SWT Designer™ component of RCP Developer empowers developers to quickly create the views, editors, perspectives, preference pages and other user interface elements that comprise Eclipse RCP applications. SWT Designer gives developers complete control over user interface construction through intuitive visual design, native look-and-feel, and access to the high performance SWT GUI framework of Eclipse RCP.

Automate GUI Testing

Once GUIs have been created, developers face the task of writing test code that will test the GUI elements.  Because of the tedious and time-consuming nature of coding test cases many developers don’t write GUI tests at all. The WindowTester™ tools of RCP Developer eliminate the need to manually create test cases to test GUIs by automating the process of GUI testing. Using WindowTester, developers can easily create tests for every GUI they create. Automating GUI testing increases the productivity of both the developer and the QA team. WindowTester empowers developers with testing capabilities and reduces the time required to hand-code tests. Using WindowTester helps developers and companies drastically lower both testing time and cost—it is not uncommon to save up to 50% or more of time required to write the tests.

Easily Create Documentation

Building good Help files can be very tedious for developers, but is critically important to users. It is a task that commonly gets low priority by development teams. The Help Composer™ component of RCP Developer is fully compatible with the Eclipse Help system. It assists in linking the logical and physical structure of help files to an application in a consistent and reliable way. The Help Composer also can quickly translate help files into web pages using an organization’s standard templates and style sheets to create easy to navigate Web-based documentation. Using Help Composer, developer needn't worry about their application Help files and Web-based Help documents being out of sync.

Streamline Build and Deployment

Preparing an application for deployment can be a frustrating and time-consuming process for the developer. Often, installing an application into the proper directories and getting it to work correctly is also a slow process for the end-user. Once a developer has created an Eclipse RCP application, they can use the RCP Packager™ component to easily create a self-contained installer that they can give to their customers to quickly install the application on the end-user desktop. Using RCP Packager, a developer can create a fully functional executable installer in minutes. The installer created by RCP Packager is a stand-alone product— the end-user simply double clicks on the executable and it launches and installs the RCP application so that it is ready to run.

Powerful, Easy to Use and Inexpensive Tools

RCP Developer, created by the development tools experts at Instantiations, is a software development product that accelerates the creation of Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) applications by providing tools for constructing and testing graphical user interfaces, creating documentation and packaging rich client applications for deployment. RCP Developer frees programmers to focus on creating business logic, rather than hand-crafting and maintaining infrastructure code that is necessary for applications to function.

Use RCP Developer to design, document, test and deploy RCP applications.

Learn more about RCP Developer »