RCP : Install Eclipse Plugins Fedora

Installing Eclipse onto Fedora 14 - X86_64

1. Start with a clean install of Fedora 14, preferably from a live CD. For my examples I used the 64 bit edition.
2. When the install is complete, open a terminal window and run yum update to bring your system up to date. You may have to reboot once this is done.
3. Install Eclipse (Helios 3.6.1) with the command yum groupinstall "Fedora Eclipse".
4. That's it! You can now use Eclipse to build C, C++ or Java programs.

What's RCP?

RCP stands for "Rich Client Platform" which defines the minimal set of plugins required to build rich clients. So, what are "rich clients"? Well, rich clients are the compliment to thin clients. Recall that thin clients refer to web-based applications where most of the work is done on the server. Rich clients then are highly interactive, graphical applications that are deployed to the client machine.

The two components of the Rich Client Platform we'll be using in this course are the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and JFace. JFace is a UI toolkit with classes for handling many common UI programming tasks.

Checking What's Already Installed

SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) should now be installed. If you look in the directory /usr/lib64/eclipse you should see links to several SWT libraries. Here's what I get when I do a directory listing:

[selmys@f14 eclipse]$ ls
about_files    libswt-atk-gtk-3655.so        notice.html
about.html     libswt-awt-gtk-3655.so        p2
artifacts.xml  libswt-cairo-gtk-3655.so      plugins
buildscripts   libswt-glx-gtk-3655.so        readme
configuration  libswt-gnome-gtk-3655.so      startup.jar
dropins        libswt-gtk-3655.so            swt-gtk-3.6.1.jar
eclipse        libswt-pi-gtk-3655.so         swt-gtk-3.6.jar
eclipse.ini    libswt-xpcominit-gtk-3655.so  swt.jar
epl-v10.html   libswt-xulrunner-gtk-3655.so
features       links
[selmys@f14 eclipse]$

JFace should also be installed. You can verify this by listing the /usr/lib64/eclipse/plugins directory. Here you'll see the jface JAR files.

org.eclipse.jface_3.6.1.M20100825-0800.jar
org.eclipse.jface.databinding_1.4.0.I20100601-0800.jar
org.eclipse.jface.text_3.6.1.r361_v20100825-0800.jar

Installing SWT Examples

There are many SWT examples which you can examine and run. These are not already installed. You can install them from inside Eclipse Helios by doing the following.

1. Open the main update manager by clicking Help > Install New Software.... This opens the Install Wizard.
2. Select The Eclipse Project Updates site.
3. Ensure Group items by category is unchecked.
4. Type "Eclipse SDK Examples" in the search field.
5. Select "Eclipse SDK Examples" and click Next.
6. Review the items being installed, and click Next.
7. Review and accept the license terms, and click Finish.

You can run any of the examples by doing the following:

1. From Eclipse's Window menu, select Show View > Other
2. In the Show View dialog, expand SWT Examples and select the SWT Example Launcher view
3. Select an example from the list and click on the Run button.