Chapter 5.  Starting the Hyperbola Prototype - Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications

Chapter 5. Starting the Hyperbola Prototype

At this stage, you have created the skeleton for Hyperbola. You know how to run it, debug it, and are familiar with the basic classes that are part of all RCP applications. The next few chapters focus on iteratively developing Hyperbola. This next iteration is interesting because it allows you to quickly get something running so you can show it to your mom, your boss, or your friends. It's also a lot more fun to learn RCP while developing something concrete.

The iterative approach used to develop Hyperbola is how software is developed in most organizations. You start by creating a prototype that could be used to demo Eclipse RCP to your friends or colleagues. You iterate again and augment the prototype with real domain logic, in our case, the messaging library, and start to think about packaging and branding the product. You then continue iterating and adding functionality and manage the complexity until you have a product to ship.

Prototypes are often crude but provide an excellent way of exploring various aspects of the application to be built. In this chapter, we show you how to extend the skeleton version of Hyperbola by adding the following features:

• a primitive contacts list that shows a list of contacts and contact groups

• a simple messaging model that is used to drive the UI components

• images to make the contact list look real

For the moment, we ignore the details of how to chat with someonethe focus is on getting familiar with the basics. Here we add the contacts list and its supporting model. In the next two chapters, we add the chat editor and associated actions. Figure 5-1 gives a peek at Hyperbola after that work is completed.