Eclipse Rich Client Platform

Overview

Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) powers some of the world's most sophisticated desktop applications. This comprehensive guide takes you from first principles to professional application development, combining crystal-clear explanations with hands-on exercises that build a complete working application.

You'll learn:

• Building modern UIs with SWT, JFace, and CSS styling
• OSGi modularity, dependency injection, and platform services
• Command-line builds with Maven and Tycho
• Migrating legacy Eclipse 3.x applications

Whether you're building your first Eclipse application or modernizing existing systems, this book provides the complete roadmap. Each chapter pairs thorough explanations with detailed exercises. Choose your learning style: dive into code first or study the concepts before practicing.

This fourth edition is fully updated for Eclipse 2025-12 and reflects real-world best practices from hundreds of training sessions and production projects.

The material of this book has also been used in countless Eclipse RCP training sessions. In these sessions it has proven to be very effective in order to learn the Eclipse 4 platform.

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Paperback

The printed paperback edition is available worldwide via the ISBN 978-3943747164.

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e-Book

This e-Book is available on Amazon as a Kindle Edition. You can read it on a Kindle device or any other modern smartphone and tablet using the Kindle app.

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Author

Lars Vogel is an Eclipse Platform and PDE committer who has shaped Eclipse RCP technology for over two decades. He served for nearly a decade as co-lead of the Eclipse Platform and e4 projects and as a member of the Eclipse Project Management Committee, helping define the strategic direction of the Eclipse platform

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Errata

Every book has errors/mistakes to a certain degree.

In case you find errors which have not yet been reported, please send an error report by email to: erratabooks@vogella.com .

Errors might be one of the following:

• Typographical errors
• Examples that do not work as described in the book
• Factual errors that are not open to interpretation