what should I use eclipse rcp or eclipse scout?

Question

i am planning to develop desktop application using java code, and wanted to use any ready
made framework and then i got know about eclipse RCP / eclipse scout but i am in doubt that which framework should i use whether eclipse rcp or eclipse scout ? could somebody suggest me please.

Answer 1

first of all I'd like to add another option: Eclipse Riena. Eclipse Riena is comparable to Eclipse Scout as it is based on Eclipse RCP and provides some useful abstractions. You should have a look at it.

But to give you some help deciding which one to use: If you are doing your first steps in Eclipse RCP, I would suggest that you first get your hands dirty with a little bit of plain Eclipse RCP. There is some complexity which will get back to you if just start with a higher level framework like Scout/Riena.

Depending on plans with your desktop application, this might already be good enough.

Scout/Riena do help you with more advanced topics like reuse/standardization, remoting, proven application architecture. But like most frameworks, you lose some flexibility.

What I especially like about Eclipse Riena:

• Focus on easy to use GUI (will not fit for every project)
• Abstraction over SWT/JFace (Ridgets) provides nice facility for controller tests, rendering the need for GUI tests to a minimum
• Nice API to (dynamically ) structure and validate your application
• Simplify remoting (no Java EE container dependencies on the client)
• You can use parts of Riena independently. Say you can use the ridgets without adding the whole bunch of other perhaps not needed stuff.

What I like about Eclipse Scout

• Strong focus on integration in Java EE environment
• Wizards all over: Quite simple to create a first and second shot of your GUI
• Supports swap of your GUI technology: You can move from SWT to Swing quite swiftly, though I wouldn't bet that is easy for a large application. ;)

HTH

Regards,

Holger

Answer 2

I can't comment/judge about your comments regarding Riena. However, I'd like to add some comments/clarifications regarding Scout

The fact that Scout comes with the Scout SDK tooling is a big help to beginners. This makes it ideal to get started with writing desktop applications. As the output of all the wizards is only Java code and some needed wiring in plugin.xml etc. it means that you're free to do Scout applications without using the Scout SDK (you can even have mixed teams working on the same code). This is possible as the Scout application model is just a bunch of Java classes.

Holger rightly mentions that you can swap the UI technology with Scout applications. This is possible as the programmers writes the model of the UI. For each supported UI technology (currently Swing, SWT, RAP (for web applications)) a specific plugin will actually draw the UI depending on the available UI model. This is a very clean separation of the UI technology and the application model. Therefore swapping works even for very large applications (Of course there are some exceptions to this rule: If your desktop application has some Microsoft Office integration part on the client side you will find it hard to support that in a web application).

Try some of the Scout tutorials and let us know what you think in the forum.

Best regards Matthias