MainFAQ

RCPForms FAQ

Does it cost money ?

No, it is fully open source, published under EPL like the rest of Eclipse.
If you need a different license for you company, please contact the Author Marco van Meegen.
This product is not meant to earn money, but to make Eclipse RCP more easy usable (and to
show that the author is a very experienced Eclipse Pro who can be booked as consultant and might solve you
a lot of problems using Eclipse ;-)).

Does it have dependencies to other libraries or APIs ?

No, it is 100% eclipse compatible and only needs RCP. If you want to use EMF model adapter, of course you need EMF ;-)

Can it be mixed with standard Eclipse technologies ?

Of course, it heavily builds on standard Eclipse technologies, thus you can use all features from SWT, JFace, Data Binding and UI Forms. No limits !
Anyway, some of the features might conflict with direct API usage, e.g. using the hierarchical en/disablement of widgets available in RCP, e.g. disabling a section disables all controls and does not render mandatory field markers etc.. will conflict with directly en/disabling the widgets contained in the section; so you have to know what you do if you mix these.

Do my classes have to implement specific interfaces or have annotations to work with RCPForms ?

in general, no. As model you can use plain Java Beans, your classes need not support any specific interface at all. If you write your own ModelAdapter, the framework can exploit meta-information from your model, like database enum value support, reusing validations or field length information which might be available in your model.

RCPForms is layered; if you want to use one of the upper layers, there will be some constraints placed on the UI components you create; if you already have UI components e.g. a specific MySpecialFormPart implementation, you might loose some comfort, but still inside the form part you can use widget wrappers, mandatory markers, binding and so on.

Does it support more powerful tables or trees ?

No, it builds on standard swt/jface, it never replaces a native swt widget with a self-made one. You might want to integrate nebula widgets, and we'll keeep our eyes open on development in this area, but the main goal is not to introduce dependencies to non-standard Eclipse technologies like e.g. KTable.

Does it work with RAP ?

This is not tested yet, but definitely a nr one priority; if you use RCP Forms your application should run on RCP or RAP without changing a single line of code in your forms.

Does it run standalone, as SWT application without OSGI runtime ?

Yes. The example application runs as plain SWT application. You have to be careful about loading resources like images and colors, since there you can easily introduce dependencies to osgi, but if you follow the examples, you can run on plain swt as well. Especially for testing forms this is really helpful.

How can I test RCP Forms ?

They are standard swt, thus you can test using standard swt testing tools. Examples are provided for unit tests using swtbot.

Which version of Eclipse does it support ?

Its mainly written for Eclipse 3.3 and higher; but a backport for Eclipse 3.2 with some functionality limitation does exist (remember, that Eclipse 3.2 does not support error markers and databinding, thus this was backported too for you.