Eclipse RCP/RAP is the natural choice for businesses

As an Eclipse enthusiast I always wondered why, in The Netherlands and Belgium at least, there aren’t many companies who use Eclipse as a framework for their business applications. The only examples around of companies who are using Eclipse have built really complex and techie applications for operating robots and unmanned marine devices or analyzing data coming from several sensors and serial ports fitted on some sophisticated machinery …

I have yet to see an Eclipse business application for an insurance company or a real estate company or hear an IT manager say “We want Eclipse as the platform”. Indeed, when java is concerned it is always Spring, Struts, Hibernate,…

This is strange because from a technical point of view Eclipse is really the natural choice for businesses.

Here’s why:

• It is a platform. This means that every developer in a company develops on this platform and therefor contributes his code or functionality to the rest of the company.
• It is just java. No matter if you are coding for the web or the desktop it is just plain old java which means your java developers need little effort to start working with the Eclipse platform.
• It is proven. The Eclipse RCP framework has been around since the late 1990′s. Many businesses have successfully used it as an enterprise wide platform. Nasa, for example, have their Ensemble project or IBM with their Rational suite or Lotus suite. But, maybe the best proof is the most popular amongst the java IDE’s is the Eclipse IDE, which is just another application built with the Eclipse Platform.
• It is maintained. The Eclipse platform is maintained by the Eclipse Foundation and continues to be developed. In fact, since 2001, there has been a new release every year!
• It is free. The platform is free, no license fee, no costs,…. free.
• It has a lot of functionality. As Eclipse IDE users we have a lot of tools at our disposal. We have for example Cheat Sheets where, if we forget how to do something, we can open a Cheat Sheet where we can check and even execute a step by step procedure on how to do it. Or we have code completion and syntax coloring, where Eclipse automatically proposes how to complete our java code and gives it a distinctive color. Image this in a business application where the user starts typing a contract number and Eclipse proposes to complete the details of the contract and inserts a hyperlink to the contract details in the document. Furthermore, it could color important keywords in a document like contract number or contract user. Or imagine a Cheat Sheet for a user to create a new contract from scratch while the customer is on the phone.

As open-source is getting a growing momentum in the enterprise software landscape nowadays, I hope Eclipse will also benefit from it and get it’s rightful place in enterprise architecture.

For more information on Eclipse RCP (desktop applications) go to their website and for Eclipse RAP (browser applications) go to their website.

If you want to learn about us, please visit our site SmartApps

Advertisement