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