I am intrigued by how Eclipse shocked the Java world with its IDE. Today, Eclipse is the most well-known opens-source IDE. IBM, together with other IT companies such as Redhat, Suse, TogetherSoft plus a bunch of kick-ass open-source developers made the initiative successful. Eclipse is now well-known and used by most of developers I know. I believe it’s the most popular Java development tool right now.

I have been developing applications for the web since I ever started programming a few years back. Somehow I feel, web applications just does not cut it. I mean you can’t do eveything with web applications. There are a lot of limitations especially if you would like to work with real-time stuff. Unless you would embed an applet, real-time display of information is really near to impossible. Others may argue that you can do a page refresh every time. It still isn’t real-time if you get what I mean. They say AJAX is the way to go. For presentation, yes. But for kick-ass applications, I doubt it.

Here comes Eclipse RCP. Others may disagree but I believe this is the next big thing. Hardware is getting cheap and becoming more powerful. So what’s the point of creating applications wherein processing is done mostly in the server side. The best example of such applications are web applications.

What we need are applications that will harness the client’s PC’s computing power. Eclipse RCP will be the great equalizer. Since it already has a built-in shell, it’s pretty easy to create your own application. What you need to do is just follow the framework and viola! You’re done. It’s not that easy but it cuts out some work. If you want to develop everything from scratch, there’s SWT. SWT uses your OS’ standard GUI libraries. Like for example in Linux, it would be gtk. For windows, the standard GUI libraries that comes with it.

I am not saying that application servers and servlet containers like Geronimo,JBoss, or Tomcat will have no use anymore. They still will be there to serve their purpose. Since we’re evolving back to client-server applications, we need a stable backend for the server part. What I’m saying is that clients should share the load. What’s the use of your P4 machine or a 64-bit AMD with 1GB RAM if you don’t utilize it. Now how do we use these web containers and application servers? We use them to handle the logic at the server side and take advantage of HTTP. You can even provide a secure transmission with SSL. You don’t have to create your server from scratch anymore like they did a few years back. You can use web services as your transmission protocol if you want. There are a lot of possibilities. It would look something like this.

RCP Client –> Application server(e.g. Geronimo, JBoss, Tomcat) <– RCP Client

So what do you think?