Rich Client Platform

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a piece of software consisting of the following components:

  • a core
  • a standard bundling framework
  • a portable widget toolkit
  • file buffers, text handling, text editors
  • a workbench (views, editors, perspectives, wizards)
  • Update Manager

Programmers can build their own applications on existing platforms. Instead of having to write a complete application from scratch, they can benefit from proven and tested features of the framework provided by the platform. Building on a platform facilitates faster application development and integration, while the cross-platform burden is taken on by the platform developers.

Their creators claim that programs built with RCP platforms are portable to many operating systems while being as rich as client-server applications which use so called fat clients or traditional clients.

Open source examples are the Eclipse, NetBeans and Spring Framework RCPs for Java.

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