Java

Eclipse Rich Client Platform : Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java(TM) Applications (Eclipse (Addison-Wesley))

Format: Paperback
Author: Jeff McAffer
ReleaseDate: 11 October, 2005
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:

Grateful
NET fiasco. By way of background, I am an old VC++/MFC developer with a smattering of the . I loved VC++ 6. 0 but balk at Uncle Billie's ponderous extravaganza. I had also done some Java a while ago and wanted to get back into it. I found Eclipse to be a marvel of robustness and complexity. Despite my experience, after a couple of weeks diddling around with this attempting to make sense of my own Java "hello worlds", I figured I'd tumble for a couple of books. I purchased this book and Eclipse: Building Commercial Quality Plug-ins (Clayberg, Rubel) and (almost) all was revealed.

Please note that I am not entirely through these books, but I find them more than suitable for clearing up the mysteries. They may have some of the drawbacks cited by the less charitable reviews, but I have found both to be more than adequate if one progresses through each "playing with eclipse as you go". I am grateful, by the way, to both authors for NOT making their works these 1,000-page "bible" book stops loaded with unneeded persiflage and useless appendices. Both are just enough to tote from home to work without a backache.

A money-saving recommendation: try and find a new/used earlier edition. They are just as suitable and saves a little on the bottom line.
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improve your productivity with Eclipse as a framework
Eclipse is of course a powerful Integrated Development Environment, and other books in this series have comprehensively explained it as such. The authors describe how Eclipse is growing in ways perhaps not foreseen to its earlier designers and users. But here, we see a relatively new aspect to Eclipse.

In detail, it is explained how Eclipse can function as a framework for making a user interface program (the "client") with sophisticated ("rich") functionality. For you, the programmer, there are ways to plug your project-specific code into Eclipse. Why? The payoff is that Eclipse offers a lot of useful code, perhaps best described as plumbing, to do a lot of the routine stuff common to many UI programs.

To be sure, there are numerous details about how to do this. Not trivial. Which accounts for the length of the book. But, with just moderate experience as a Java programmer, the narrative should be comprehensible.

The basic idea in the book is that you gain two advantages by using Eclipse in this fashion. You get more productivity, by not having to code common and mundane functionality. Plus, debugging may be easier. Because the Eclipse code is very solid and well tested. And hence you can focus debugging attention on your specific code.

For advanced engineers: integrate Java and RCP plug-ins
Advanced engineers of Eclipse RSP who want to develop Java applications using the native GUIs and Eclipse must have this reference: it integrates Java and RCP plug-in developments and provides coding and design specifics advanced programmers will welcome. Jeff McAffer and Jean-Michel Lemieux's ECLIPSE RICH CLIENT PLATFORM: DESIGNING, CODING AND PACKAGING JAVA APPLICATIONS focuses on Eclipse's plug-ins which can translate to desktop operations ranging from chats to customization of views and editors. .