PrefaceIn many ways, this book is one of the design documents for the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). It was written during the Eclipse 3.1 development cycle by members of the development team. Its chapters were sometimes written before the related function was even implemented. The exercise of explaining how things work forced upon us the realities of using the mechanisms and concepts that make up the Eclipse RCP. This was not always pleasant. It did, however, give us a unique opportunity to correct the course of the Eclipse RCP. Whenever we came across something that was hard to explain or complicated to use, we were able to step back and consider changing Eclipse to make things easier. Often we could, and often we (or, more accurately, the Eclipse Platform team as a whole) did. It is somewhat hard to convey the joyful feeling of deleting a complicated, detailed 10-page set of instructions or explanation and replacing it with just a paragraph detailing a new wizard or facility. On other occasions, we gained key insights that helped us produce a clearer, simpler description of a function. Fixing bugs discovered during this process provided welcome distractions as we were writing, coding, learning, and trying to have real lives all at the same time. We learned an incredible amount about Eclipse as an RCP and trust that you will too.
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