Part III. The Workbench

The Workbench provides the UI building blocks that make Eclipse applications easy to write, easy to use, scalable, and extendable. One of the main advantages of using the Eclipse RCP is the benefit you get from reusing the UI building blocks—it allows you to focus on your domain without having to redesign the wheel. This is evident from the fact that the Hyperbola application developed in Part II required relatively little code.

But that work only scratched the surface of what is possible. The Workbench is much more powerful. It is made up of over 50 extension points and over 350 API classes. It would take an entire book to do justice to the functionality provided. Rather than attempt a broad partial coverage, the next few chapters focus on the parts of the Workbench that are essential for RCP applications. They dive into their API and use them to solve problems motivated by Hyperbola in various real-world scenarios.

You should come away from this part of the book with a solid understanding of the Workbench’s structure and how you can control and customize its operation.