There are many parts of RCP that are a little rough around the edges. That’s to be expected in an open-source framework, and to be honest it’s one of the things I like about RCP. Sure, commercial frameworks are cleaner and packaged more “professionally”, but they have to give up a lot of functionality and dynamism to achieve this.
But once in a while I hit a problem that just makes me go ugh! (and grrrr!). One of the best examples of this is the fact that if you don’t give an editor an icon, your editor won’t show up. If you happen to have logging turned on (and if your launch configuration does not include the -consoleLog parameter, it really should), you’ll at least get a somewhat informative message on startup:
!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 4 2007-04-30 15:37:05.037 !MESSAGE Plugin com.marketcontours.ui.builder, extension org.eclipse.ui.editors Required attribute 'icon' not defined
But you may not understand the true importance of this message until you try to open your editor. At that point you’ll more than likely get a very unhelpful NullPointerException, as the editor registry will simply return you a null editor.
I probably shouldn’t admit this (being a trainer and all), but I’ve actually had this happen to me repeatedly, and for some reason it always takes me a while to figure out what’s going on. It may have something to do with my failing to believe that omitting an icon could have this kind of effect. Also, in every class I teach, there is at least one student that hits this problem and is completely dumbfounded. I’m going to assume based on this random sample that many beginning RCP developers run into this.
There is already a Bugzilla entry for this defect (it’s actually listed as an enhancement), if you feel like voting for it.