0

I am working on a standalone Eclipse RCP product. My team replaced another team that wrote the infrastructure of the product.

I and my team leader aren't very happy with the Eclipse RCP framework because we feel that it is just very hard to get it to work correctly.

This is because:

  1. The GUI building tools are annoying. XWT is buggy (bindings don't always work, can't add scrollbars, and this is only the half of it). SWT also isn't very exciting. I don't like the API and it doesn't have too many exciting widgets.
  2. Eclipse IDE itself is buggy (we have to restart it every few hours). We are using eclipse juno. When we tried to upgrade to luna we ran into some unsolvable issues: Eclipse Luna: Handlers' @CanExecute methods not called due to wrong context
  3. We have lots of weird bugs (e.g. eclipse looks at wrong selection service and much more).
  4. Even though there is support and documentation, we find that it is kind of poor compared to other solutions out there.
  5. Due to the above, developement of simple things seem to take too long. We have another .NET product which is much easier to write.

However, google didn't seem to badmouth eclipse rcp... So I wanted to ask, what do you guys think about it? Do you find it easy to use? Do you find it flexible? Just want to hear some opinions.

Thanks!!!

Community
  • 1
  • 1
whomaniac
  • 1,258
  • 4
  • 15
  • 22
  • 2
    This is asking for opinions which is off-topic for SO. Personally I have no problem with Eclipse e4 development particularly if you follow Lars Vogel's book / tutorial. – greg-449 Oct 29 '14 at 08:28
  • @whomaniac are you thinking about including already existing plug-ins into the application, or is it a standalone RCP app? – Vlad Ilie Oct 29 '14 at 08:30
  • @greg-449 I think programmers.stackexchange.com should be fine for this though, no? – Vlad Ilie Oct 29 '14 at 08:32
  • @VladIlie Programmers also does not accept opinion based questions. – greg-449 Oct 29 '14 at 08:36
  • So what is a good forum to ask? I thought about asking in the eclipse forum but I thought it would be too rude or something. @VladIlie It is mainly a standalone but I am using some plugins like the css plugin. – whomaniac Oct 29 '14 at 12:45
  • 1
    After 2 years of it, I've had a few battles with the Properties View (sorting properties), and also with Error View (adding tooltips) so far, that were due to the framework. Giving my own sorter to the Standard Properties View was not possible, and the Tooltip required a static method to be accessed from the class ColumnViewerToolTipSupport ... Despite some issues, I would say it is a fast way of developing a desktop application. If the client would demand SPECIFIC & EXACT changes to Standard Eclipse GUI, I wouldn't recommend it. – Vlad Ilie Oct 29 '14 at 15:51

0 Answers0