RCP Best Practices – Know where to get help

Getting started

  1. Introduction
  2. Know where to get help
  3. Use RCP for the right reasons
  4. Use the correct version of RCP
  5. Use the correct tools
  6. Set up a target platform
  7. Mirror Eclipse repositories
  8. Create a product configuration
  9. Define products with feature based dependencies
  10. Remove versions from product dependencies
  11. Always run code using a product configuration
  12. Get your product building right away

There’s a lot of information out there on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Here are a set of resources that can help you find the answers you need.

  • Planet Eclipse – Almost everyone blogging about Eclipse related topics is syndicated on the Planet Eclipse feed. Get a feed reader and subscribe today. 
  • Safari Books Online – Most of the books on Eclipse are available on the Safari service. This includes some books which are unfortunately out of print (e.g. The Standard Widget Toolkit). 
  • Eclipse Forums – The forums have a wealth of information. And remember that most of your questions will have been asked already. Search before you ask.
  • Blogs – There are many blogs devoted to Eclipse RCP and one of the best is written by Lars Vogel. The tutorials on his site are a must read for anyone learning Eclipse RCP.
  • Training – Based on my experience training hundreds of developers, there’s nothing that compares with training when it comes to getting immediately productive with Eclipse RCP. A few days of training can save you months of your time.
  • stackoverflow – stackoverflow is quickly becoming the default place to ask technical questions and this is true for RCP as well. There is an eclipse-rcp tag you can use to filter for RCP-related content, and you can even subscribe to this tag using your feed reader if you like. Thanks to Arieh for mentioning this in the comments.

I’m sure there are many good resources I’ve missed, so please help out and keep the listing going in the comments section. And if  you go through these options and still haven’t found the answer to your question, feel free to ask me. I’m always happy to help.